The wings were always there, you just couldn’t see them.
Poisonous butterflies and instructions on metamorphosis
I will tell you something beautiful. Several things in fact.
Occasionally we might hide ourselves away, dissolve and re-form. More often we do this changing in plain view. It takes longer and the change is imperceptible one day to the next. Sometimes things seem to change all of a sudden, though we are usually just paying attention to the last part of the process.
As I am saying goodnight our two older children ask me about metamorphosis.
In this part of summer, where the days stretch out, we usually start to carefully gather the caterpillars from the swan plant at the bottom of the garden to keep them from being taken by the paper wasps. Sometimes the eggs themselves too, tiny opalescent pearls on the undersides of the leaves. We carry them up to the netted enclosure. In time their chrysalides will hang from its roof by black silken threads. One summer we had twenty at once, one day after the next cracking open into butterflies. There are fewer this summer so far, nor do the swan plants seem to want to grow.
Monarchs lay their eggs on swan plants here, milkweed elsewhere, named for the white latex they bleed when cut. It’s a strange kind of symbiosis. Milkweed belongs to the group of plants, also including oleander and foxgloves, that contain the poisons called cardiac glycosides. If enough is ingested it might stop your heart although more often lower doses will cause vomiting in the main. Of course what is poison can also be medicine in the right dose. We used digitalis from the foxglove to treat heart failure and dysrhythmias, though not so much anymore.
The cardiac glycosides are toxic to most vertebrates. Monarchs, and their caterpillars, are adapted to take up the poison from the plant and concentrate it, becoming poisonous themselves as well as beautiful. Though not generally fatal, birds that eat monarchs or their bright yellow and black caterpillars do not tend to repeat the mistake.
Both our older children came to speech relatively late, causing us concern at the time. Our daughter used her own invented signs instead of spoken words for a while. I took her to the butterfly house once - she must have been two maybe. As bright blue butterflies danced above her head she made her sign for butterfly; with fingers extended she would open and close her fists rapidly, both hands rising above her as if she wished to be lifted high up into the air too.
Butterflies, like moths, are holometabolous, meaning they undergo complete metamorphosis.The monarch has one of the prettiest metamorphoses of all butterflies I think. Its chrysalis is bright green and extrudes tiny gold beads on its surface. Here’s a thing. The chrysalis is the inside of the caterpillar itself, which then hardens into a shell. If you watch a time lapse of the caterpillar as it hangs there, it shakes itself out entirely from its own skin, left as a small blackened reminder of what it had been.
While I am answering questions in one bedroom, our youngest child is fast asleep in another, the door slightly ajar. This year he has been diagnosed with autism. Things always change but to us he is the same bright and beaming boy as he was before we knew. He spoke the earliest of all three of them. He is hyper-verbal. Sometimes the words flow from his mouth like a river in flood.
I’d like to think the world will be as open to him as to it should be. Part of me knows though that often people want us to be one thing and not the other. If he asks why people are this way I will have to tell him I don’t know exactly, because no-one can explain to me why this has to be the case either.
I think I might have gasped when I read, not so long ago, that what actually happens is the caterpillar digests itself into an unrecognisable soup inside the chrysalis, before starting over again to create its new morphology. I explained this excitedly to the kids but the questions came back straight away - how does the butterfly form then? Does it have a brain in there? I had to admit I didn’t know.
From distant memory I know roughly how we form. Most of our morphological work is done in utero. Our first stem cells can become whatever they like but signals both internal and external cause them to change into their specific selves. Tissues and organs form. Our hearts twist like balloon animals, from a simple tube into pumping chambers; our guts spin around their attachments into labyrinths; our brains flex and fold and fold, nerve cells migrating, pulling their long wires into complex circuits that light up when we first hear the sound of ourselves floating.
Two hundred words were added to Te Reo Māori in 2017. One of them was a word for autism, takiwātanga. I believe it translates to “in his/her own time and space”. This made me smile when I read it. This is a time of so many cruel words, when we should be full of grace for each other instead. It’s good to remind ourselves that language can be generous too.
The answer to the question is more magic than you might think. The soup into which the caterpillar dissolves itself is not entirely featureless at the start. There are bits of legs and things that remain constants but, more than that, there are these imaginal discs that were present in the caterpillar, hidden away. A bit like stem cells, they could become anything initially but they form something specific. For example there are two discs that form the wings, two for the antennae, two for the eyes and so on.
The last question was this. If it is so radically different afterwards, does the butterfly remember being a caterpillar? I had no answer to that either. I wondered whether if, once you were free to soar away so gracefully, you would choose to remember being grounded.
It’s a commonly asked question as it turns out. Even if butterflies don’t remember being a caterpillar in the way we experience memory, they do at least retain some of the things they have learned. Parts of their nervous system must remain intact. Scientists exposed moth caterpillars to the chemical ethyl acetate (essentially nail polish remover) and then gave them small electric shocks in association with being near the chemical. After transformation most of the adult moths avoided the chemical. They had retained the memory of what had hurt them.
Imaginal is such a lovely word I think. It does have one meaning of pertaining to the imagination. The way it is used for the growth discs though relates to imago, the word for the final adult form of a larval insect. Both follow the Latin root imagin- (likeness, copy or picture).
The Century Dictionary has a quaint way of putting it. The imago is “the final perfect stage of an insect,” it says. “The name is due to the fact that the insect … having, as it were, cast off its mask or disguise, has become a true representation or image of its species”.
It’s funny how we view our own lifetimes the other way around. We say we begin with this uncorrupted innocence, all perfect skin and asking sweet questions of a world that ends up chipping away at us. We learn to mask ourselves. But we can learn good things too, right, like grace? And then we have to pass it back again. Be generous. Anyway we’re far too preoccupied with perfection. Each bit is just different to the bit before.
As I’m stooping to kiss my youngest son’s forehead and whisper goodnight as he sleeps, I like to imagine something. He’s in a cocoon of dreams, bending space and time around his world in whatever beautiful way he chooses. Becoming as brilliant as the Evening Star that hangs low above the horizon as I write this.
Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments or interesting insect related trivia! I know I said I’d explain the title of the Substack but I ended up writing closer to home pre-Christmas. I hope everyone gets to have some time to dwell peacefully over the Christmas break and just generally find some joy at the end of the year (and read something you love!). See you after.
The wings were always there, you just couldn’t see them.
Alex this is incredible 😭❤️ I am so glad you started this substack. You have words... ! and stories and insights and wisdom and also generosity and lightness. I will return again and again to read this, in fact I’ll be printing it out to put in my fave essays folder. I needed this particular gift of writing today in a way it’s hard to explain. There’s clues in here I still can’t quite grasp but my curiosity is ignited. The amazing thing about metaphor and in particular those that come from te taiao is how much better we can understand ourselves when we are able to witness something external to ourselves so deeply. I don’t have the language or scientific knowledge experience to witness as you have, so thank u for sharing. What an awesome Dad, to answer the questions not with absolutes, but with potential and imagination. Takiwātanga - I hadn’t heard that, but yes. How correct. And so fitting in the context of the monarch’s transformation. Ka Nui te mihi inside all the big things e hoa.
Beautiful, Alex. It is funny how we conceive of the journey through a human life. I think subconsciously sometimes I feel that I peaked in my late 30s when I was “truly myself” and at ease in the world (momentarily!) And, ever since it’s been a kind of downhill slide of realising physical and mental limitations and discomfort. And being confronted with our human mortality repeatedly. Of course, that’s not actually true and so many of our potentials only develop more as we get older.