Chapter 1: What unique features do caterpillars possess?
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Hey, and welcome to the playlist. The Stuff You Should Know Think Spring playlist, to be exact. Chuck, Jerry, and I figured it was high time that winter got the heck on. So we're tapping into all of our wishful thinking and getting the crocuses to sprout and the air to warm up and the chipmunks to come out.
For our first episode, we're going with caterpillars, colon, nature's magicians, because we can't think of a more poetic way to kick things off. So enjoy this episode, and enjoy the playlist, and don't forget to think spring with all your might.
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Chapter 2: How do caterpillars transform into butterflies?
She very legendarily stayed up for 72 straight hours and wrote like more than two dozen insect articles in that time. They just got weirder and weirder as the time went on.
I almost believe that for a second. But Tracy always does a great job with those or did a great job in most of ā Most of the insect articles we've ever used have been Tracy's original, like the ticks and the fleas, and I don't think ants, but bees probably, wasps.
She's a master of it for sure.
I mean, she wrote a lot of them, and this one about caterpillars was from Tracy, along with stuff from World Atlas in the 88 and breedingbutterflies.com. But I just realized today when I was researching this some more that we haven't done butterflies yet.
No.
Which is shocking. We've done one. We did the wings, like the iridescence.
Okay, that's what it was. Yeah, and we talked about them in the animal migration episode, too.
Yeah, but not a standalone on butterflies. So we're going to talk about their counterpart. And one of the facts of the episode already for me is that caterpillars that eventually turn into butterflies, it's the same species. It's still the same thing.
Right. Never knew that. We should do a two.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of caterpillars in ecosystems?
I love caterpillars, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah. And it was also one of those where I just kept looking and kept looking. I was like, how has this been sitting here under our noses all this time? I don't know. Because it's right up our alley to talk about something like caterpillars.
Yeah, one of the reasons why they are so different and they're configured differently is that a caterpillar's life is the larval stage of an adult moth or butterfly. That's probably the best easy definition of a caterpillar.
The reason that it's configured differently than its adult form is because in the larval stage, its entire life is pooping, eating, pooping, molting, eating, pooping, molting. That's what I saw the caterpillar's life described as over the course of five different molts, as we'll see. That's all it does. That's all it wants to do. It just wants to eat.
So it's designed essentially as an eating machine. Right.
Yeah, kind of shark-like. And as Tracy points out, it's a very singular purpose. And that same butterfly has a singular purpose later on, which is propagating the species, if you know what I'm saying. But the caterpillar, yeah, it's very shark-like. All it does is eat and store food and poop it out.
And they eat so much that apparently they say that they can eat as much as 27 times their body size in their fairly short life. Yeah. And they can end up being about 100 times bigger by the time they go to pupate, which is when they, you know, hole up and turn into the butterfly. Mm-hmm. is when they pop out of that little egg that they also eat. That's amazing.
And if you want to see something just astounding, go look up a caterpillar egg or butterfly egg. I don't know which one you'd call it, but they look like little, have you ever seen Vaseline glass? They look like little like ornate Vaseline glass vases.
Yeah, they're very pretty.
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Chapter 4: How do caterpillars protect themselves from predators?
It has a mechanism where it releases an enzyme. There's a hormone that says, hey, you're getting a little ā your clothes are getting a little tight. Maybe it's time to molt. And so that releases an enzyme that basically dissolves its attachment to the exoskeleton. And then the new, bigger version pops out of the old exoskeleton, walks away, and guess what it does immediately after?
It starts eating again.
Yeah. It tries to outgrow that suit that it's wearing.
And it does that five times in its larval stage as a caterpillar.
Yeah. These molts are called instars. Did you say that?
That's the period of its life between molts.
Yeah, yeah. So five instars in between molts, like you said, all it's doing is just eating, trying to get a larger suit size. But here's another cool fact, is they believe that not only do caterpillars have a memory
that lasts like a molt or two, but they even think there are researchers at Georgetown that have sort of proven that, I don't know how you sort of prove something, but they feel pretty good about the fact that they think that a butterfly remembers being a caterpillar.
Yeah, they've done at least one study that showed that if they trained it to avoid certain smells as one of its last instars, it will remember that as an adult butterfly. It'll avoid those same smells. That's pretty cool. Because as you'll see, what happens in the chrysalis is so mind-bending and nuts that the idea that it can remember anything is pretty amazing.
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Chapter 5: What are the different types of caterpillars?
Okay. I didn't know if that was, you know, a dirty thing to say or not.
No, no. That's all over. It's like douchebag now. It was at one time like not very nice, but now everybody says it. Oh, really? It even shows up in like PG-13 movies.
Oh, I thought you meant it was okay to say. Yes. You're a real douchebag. Okay.
Oh, no, no, no. It's still not nice to say, but it's not like, you know, a horrid thing to say like it used to be.
I got you. Because someone called me one the other day in a car and I was like, oh, thank you. Did they really?
No, no.
Oh, okay. They don't have bones, of course, but they do have lots of, they're very muscly. If you compare them to a human, we have about 629 muscles. Caterpillars have 4,000 muscles because those muscles, that's the way they're moving. You know, they move in a little wave from front to back. Front to back? Yes, front to back. Back to front. Back to front. How did I mess that up?
Well, it depends on which direction they're going, I guess. Well, I guess so. And they move in a couple of ways. One of two ways is sometimes they're crawling, which means they're moving all of those pro legs and legs at the same time in sequence. Or they do what sounds like an inchworm does, right?
Yeah. I don't know why they didn't identify them as inchworms, but that's what they're talking about. They can move in little arches where they bring their front and their back together, making a mound out of their middle, their abdomen, and then they stretch the front out. And then they bring the back up, and then they stretch the front out. And that's what an inchworm does.
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Chapter 6: How do caterpillars contribute to pollination?
Caterpillars, pro-legs moving as they attach themselves. Like you said, they have a suction cup. They just attach themselves to the branch or whatever that they're walking on. And if you watch it in close enoughā¦ Detail? Yes. Excellent, Chuck. You can really see those suction cups working, and it's pretty cool.
It's awesome. Most things on a caterpillar are small, obviously, including their little eyelets. They have 12 of those. They're called stomata. And if you do look closely, though, it's really cool looking. They're arranged in a semicircle, sort of wrapping around the head.
Like, what's his name from Reading Rainbow, but on Star Trek The Next Generation?
LeVar Burton? Oh, yeah, LeVar Burton. Like his eyewear? Yes. Yeah. That's what I think. Except it would be on top of his head though, right? Like a headband?
No, I think it's... Is it more on the front?
I thought it was more on top. I thought it was on the front, but you could be right.
It could be on top.
It's kind of hard to tell with a caterpillar head.
Right, exactly. You don't really know what's what. It's kind of like a Studebaker. You can't tell which way it's going. Right. That joke was for our aged listeners who love a good Studebaker joke.
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Chapter 7: What are the dangers of handling certain caterpillars?
And if you could figure out how to build and insert a tiny little, like, wooden reed in each spherical, that little thing might sound like an accordion as it moved. That'd be pretty neat. Kind of cruel, too, I imagine.
Yeah, I mean, probably. If you're sticking wood in the tiny breathing holes of a caterpillar, I don't think you would appreciate that. Don't try that. By the way, Chuck, did I tell you that Caterpillar is from the old French Chateaupelos, which means shaggy cat?
Oh, like the actor Timothy Chateaupelos? Is that? No, that's Timothy Chalamet. Sorry.
Right. Yeah. Timothy Shaggy Cat would be that name.
Kind of looks like a shaggy cat.
But apparently they think it was the ā is it the Wooly Bully caterpillar that inspired that? I love those. Yeah. They think that was the original Shaggy Cat, and it just kind of caught on from there. But that's where caterpillar comes from.
Yeah. And speaking of Wooly Bully, you notice on caterpillars a lot of times those little hairs or little quills or spines. Those are called ā oh, man. We've even had scientists tell us how to pronounce that A-E. Is it satay?
That's what I think it is, yeah.
It's either that or we've been getting it wrong. I can't remember, but everyone is like, in science, guys, any time it's A-E, you pronounce the blank, and I can't remember which one it is.
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Chapter 8: What management strategies can be applied to caterpillars in gardens?
And I wasn't touching the spine, so I never got that irritation. But I used to love doing that. And I just thought that was so cool that they, I guess now knowing that they're blind, they're just like crawling on a stick. And it's like, now I'm crawling on a finger. Right.
Yeah. That's cute.
But yeah, you wouldn't stick like kid fingers.
You wouldn't have been touching the hair like structures. So it wouldn't have stung you. It's not like, I don't think it's an active process. I think it's a passive thing where you just touch it and they're not like die, die, die. It's just like, you just touched it and it did its thing passively.
Yeah. Yeah, I get the feeling the caterpillar is even like, sorry, man, and, you know, shouldn't touch me, but sorry.
Most caterpillars seem rather chill, but not all of them are. I was not happy to find this out. I find this rather unpleasant. But there's some species of caterpillars in Hawaii that are actually carnivores. Far and away, most species of caterpillars, and hence butterflies, are herbivores. They just eat leaves. That's what they do. They eat leaves and shoots. Wait, eat shoots and leaves.
Eat shoots and leaves. So there's the ones in Hawaii. They'll eat snails. And not only do they eat snails, it's really awful. They tie the snails to, say, like a twig or a leaf or something using spinnerets. They have silk-producing organs. And they'll tie the snail, the whole shell and all, to like a twig so the snail can't get away. And then they climb into the shell and eat the snail alive.
It is horrifying.
I don't like that particular kind of caterpillar, but I like all the rest. Yeah, they tie it down and eat it. So awful. Imagine it just coming into your house, too, and you're like, please no, and you have no escape, and that's that.
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