 playing with caterpillar pictures, but first off, so I'm stepping in to give a talk given as a keynote in New England across the country on caterpillars and looking really closely at their lives to uncover some really big ideas. And some of those include aspects of pollination and things about what you can do in your yard to attract these things. But I wanted to check, I mean is anyone here who specifically came for the original keynote who heard about that and wanted to see it? Okay, so I don't have to like try desperately to talk about pollinators, right? Okay, well that's fine. We can always relate aspects of caterpillar natural history to all kinds of environmental topics, pollination included, but it is funny to be invited as the caterpillar guy to the pollination festival and the pollination talk and that because I'm always trying to make these connections and it's not that difficult because a lot of caterpillars grow up to be pollinating moths and that's a pretty straight line. But at the last festival we went to, we had these hickory tussock caterpillars. Do you know the white hairy caterpillars in the fall that make you itchy? Yeah, well an outbreak here is about 50% of those produce a hairy fly called a tekinid fly that visits New England asters and is a pollinator for a lot of the fall. So I love the idea that you might need a caterpillar to be parasitized by a fly to get your pollinator for a plant. And that kind of discussion about relationships, connecting all these different creatures together and leading to you know a balance of leaf eating, caterpillar eating and pollination really excites me. So that's gonna sort of feed into the talk today. I'll start just by telling you a little bit about who I am and what I do and why I do it and then we're gonna dig in. So I'm Sam Jaffe and I run the Caterpillar Lab. Basically the Caterpillar Lab is a place where we raise thousands and thousands of caterpillars every year of hundreds of different species. We take them through their life cycles, we're seeing every moment of their existence hatching out of eggs, shedding between in-stars, these different stages of being caterpillar, pupating, coming out as moths and butterflies, interacting with ants and other animals, being parasitized. We just examine them at this microscopic level and we bring this to everyone we can bring it to. We go to nature centers, we go to museums, street corners, farmers markets, we have a facility in southern New Hampshire that people visit and we tell their stories and we sort of just try to amaze people with what's in their backyard. We have a caterpillar out there today called a tentacle hooper or the filament bearer and that caterpillar has inflatable tentacles on its back and when it takes a walk they expand out, it looks like a spider so they're trying to jump out at you. A couple of years ago a video of this caterpillar was taken on Facebook and it went viral. The caterpillar was in the same genus, looked exactly the same but the video was taken in the Amazon rainforest. So all the shares, millions of shares and all the comments were about oh look how amazing the tropics are and the diversity that's there and the strange adaptations you can see nowhere else. That is in the back, I could find that in my backyard. It's not that the Amazon is in a wonderful, diverse, incredible place it's just that we tend to overlook the things we have right here. So that's really what the caterpillar lab at its core is about. It's about revealing how impressive and inspiring our neighborhoods are the wildlife around us. So this is what a caterpillar lab program looks like. Often big free exploration programs where you meet the caterpillars, they're experts and peers talking to you, kids, parents, naturalists, photographers, everyone together, chatting and sharing the experience. Most people who come to a lab program learn something new or maybe even have their own perspectives change on what's out there. This is also why I keep doing the work. It's great to see new things. I mean just now under a microscope we were looking inside of a transparent caterpillar and we saw a parasite swimming around in its blood stream. That's pretty exciting for me but you know what I could do that in my basement like some kind of, you know, a creepy caterpillar guy but I can't do this. So this is what keeps me going with the caterpillar lab. We take these things out there and we introduce them to people and the reactions are amazing. People love this, especially little girls love this. It's really wonderful. That's probably our number one audience. I don't think she loves this that much. And this little girl was singing to a caterpillar at our programs. And this little girl loved her Socropia caterpillar but her mother did not. So it was a bit difficult for peers in the interest of this wonderful face of Socropia caterpillar. So yeah when this all started out it really was mostly about this, you know, this big charismatic native caterpillar, getting them close to kids, revealing all this value. But we can't just do the caterpillar lab. As I said we were seeing them grow and change and cu-page and morph and interact with other organisms, explode with parasitoids. So as time has gone on it's become less and less simply about that big caterpillar and more about the whole story of their lives. And that's really what this talk is about today. It's looking at caterpillars in all their variations and all their life stages through all of their interactions with each other and other organisms and trying to get at the heart of what they really are rather than just, you know, this cool squishy thing in front of you. What do they really represent in the world? And I think adding that dynamic to look at this amazing animal in front of you, adding look at its value, look at its interactions, look at its life has made our messaging much bigger. It's the wonderful things in our yard, the wonderful things we can discover, but it's also how important they are, why we need them here, why it's important to encourage biodiversity. It's sort of a, you know, save the planet kind of message these things. All right. So to begin with, I'll tell you my whole story. At the end of the talk, everyone asked me where did such a strange caterpillar guy come from? So I've just built it into like the beginning of every single talk now. My whole story started with this caterpillar. This is the Black Swallowtail Caterpillar. When I was about four or five, my mother went out into the garden. She picked some parsley, brought it in, about to put it in the cuisine art for dinner, and pulled her hand back. There were three juicy Black Swallowtail Caterpillars sitting in there. A lot of people think these are warningly colored. They may be, but they blend in really well with a bunch of parsley or fennel or dill. Those became my first caterpillar rearing experience. My father, he's a theoretical physicist, a scientist. He helped me look at these through that perspective. We ran little experiments. When it came time for them to pupae become chrysalis or pupa, we hung different colored crayons in the enclosure for them to pupae on. And they went to those crayons. I don't remember how we managed to get them to actually pupae on these crayons, but their pupa, their chrysalis, came out the color of the crayon and used brown and green. So the smooth crayons of green, they'd get these green chrysalis or yellowish green chrysalis, and the red and orange, we'd get brown and reddish orange chrysalis. Do they go to the one that they're going to, this their color, or do they adopt or do they become chrysalis? She never thought about it that way around. So there's a recent study that shows that texture is actually the most important thing, that if it's on a rough texture, you'll get a brown chrysalis. Smooth, you'll get a green. And it's not that they can be only that one thing and they go to it. They show what's called phenotypic plasticity. So what they look like is flexible based on conditions. So when they're against that rough surface, something will tell them to switch their whole gene production around and they'll become these brown chrysalis. That said, all my crayons are the same texture and they still match the colors. So as a four-year-old, we're flying in the face of the modern research. I love that you can do that with caterpillars. My mother is an artist and architect and she helped me look at these through the artistic perspective. We would draw them, we'd watch every moment of their lives, really help me look closely. And they both told me that we were going to get these beautiful butterflies from the Black Swallowtail Butterfly. And I went down every single morning hoping to see this moment. We were supposed to, as I'm trying to remember what my father described, exactly, they would turn dark, come out, dry their wings and fly off. So I'd run downstairs to see this happening and I did. I saw something come out, dry its wings and fly off. It was a trogus wasp, a parasitoid of the Black Swallowtail. And I'm afraid that first-hand experience gave me three trogus wasps, not three butterflies. But I shouldn't say afraid. I thought this was the most miraculous thing I had ever seen. Wasps came out of my chrysalis. I like to say this is what I realized that nature was full of unbound, you know, discovery and mysteries like going on, cover them all myself. And that is what inspired me. I think it really was. It was just the first time I ever knew my father to be wrong about anything. You work with a theoretical physicist who thinks he knows the nature of the universe. It's really nice when a wasp pops out of a chrysalis. You learn something that he didn't know. And I think that's one of the reasons natural history can be so wonderful for kids, because they don't necessarily need a teacher, a parent, to tell them something, to help them discover. You go out in the backyard, you turn over leaf, you see something that maybe no adult around you has ever seen before. Maybe you don't know quite what it is or what you're seeing, but you can make those discoveries on your own. I think that's really important and a really great reason to get kids engaged in natural history and the reason that they stay with it. So this is the chrogos wasp. Nowadays, we can tell when our pupa have parasitized, we can open them up and see the wasp pupa inside, watch them develop. It doesn't hurt the wasp. It just gives us this inside view. Watch them in clothes or shed and expand their wings. And this is what happens when I try and photograph them. It's like 600 pictures like this and a lot of it glaring at me. So this is me, I don't know how old I am here, but I'm looking at some monarch misalids that I reared. And I like to think that I knew they weren't just these pupa in front of me. I knew they represented something much more, that I recognized them as the caterpillars they once were, the butterflies they'd become, and just maybe little pods full of parasitic wasps too. So that's where this whole story perspective came in. And it's something that I've carried with me my whole life. A lot of people do engage with this, but we also find that sometimes we're only looking surface deep. We've been to a butterfly house before where they're all flying around. It's a wonderful experience, but we sort of are interacting with those butterflies like photographs most of the time. You know, it's their flight, their colors, maybe landing on you, but how often do we understand where they came from, what they eat as a caterpillar, who their predators were, what is their ecological significance, what is their whole story? And when we bother to ask those questions, the world becomes such an engaging place and we really don't have to take more than a few steps to be surrounded by things to discover. So nowadays, when I look at a butterfly, I don't see it as that whole story. I see it as a tiny part of the story, a really interesting one, but more like a fruit or a fruiting body than everything that's involved. So you go out there and you see any of the butterflies or moths that are out in the field, and it's not just that thing. It's everything, where it came from, what it ate, where it's going. Just like an acorn, you can't possibly understand where it came from just by looking at the acorn. It's not that acorns aren't really interesting things. This is an acorn weevil. They drill a little hole in acorns. They lay their eggs in acorns. The weevil then consumes the inside of the acorn, hops out of a hole and goes to pupae. It's not the end of the story. We've got a nice little spear. It's hollow. It's got an entry hole. We have four or five species of acorn nesting ant here in New England that move into the acorn, set up shop, queen, larva, eggs, pupae, everything. We have some out there right now. And that's not the end of the story. There are these slave-making ants, these large black ants that move in, kill the queen of these colonies, take over their workers, have them do their bidding. And when I was collecting acorn ants to serve our caterpillars, which we'll talk about later, a pupae of a moth fell out of one of these colonies, perfectly healthy and alive. How does that happen? The acorn moth that eats the inside of an acorn when living with these ants. So there's always more to the story, but still it's just an acorn, right? We can't even begin to understand that unless we look up from that acorn, those ants, those weevils, all that stuff happening at the larger picture, this super organism, an oak tree, with all of its branches, all of its leaves, all the things that eat those leaves, the things that eat those things. And you don't need to be talking in terms of oak trees, though. That little butterfly, that was a super organism too. All of its relationships, all of its story. This is the harvester butterfly and caterpillar. That was the butterfly next to the acorn. He was thought that the harvester butterfly was a rare butterfly. It doesn't visit flowers in your yard very often. It was sporadically seen. But when we looked back in its life and across its relationships, we found out that it actually wasn't that rare. It just had a very bizarre life history. This caterpillar grows, sheds, grows, all the while eating its only host, not a plant, but woolly alder aphids. It only eats aphids on alder plants. That's one of its prey items here, carnivorous butterfly caterpillar. Still, okay, so that's where the caterpillars are. Why aren't we seeing the butterflies? Well, it turns out that the butterflies just hang out with those aphid colonies too. They go down and they drink the honeydew that the aphids secrete to attract ants. The aphids are attracting ants. Hopefully, the ants will protect them, but the ants certainly aren't harboring the butterflies when they're down there looking it up. So for the rest of the talk, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start really basic with what's, you know, at the core of me here, that caterpillars are awesome. We're just gonna look at some cool caterpillars, for being caterpillars as photographs, sort of describe in a little bit. And then we're gonna add layer after layer, how they grow and change, how they interact with plants, how they interact with predators, how they interact with everything until we really understand them. Does that sound okay? All right. So this is a pretty cool one. It's on my shirt, after all. This is the black dotted prominent. It's a pretty toxic caterpillar. I actually call this photograph subtlety, because I'm being sarcastic, I mean it's. This caterpillar, you get near it, it rears back, it's rear end goes up in the air, it's head curves all the way around, it wobbles side to side, it's got these bright colors. This is a very poisonous caterpillar. Although I think it also looks a bit like a 1970s plethora couch, it's still one of them, maybe this thick. Here's another caterpillar you might not want to try eating. This is the turbulent Phosphilla. The turbulent Phosphilla caterpillar, there's these big masses eating Smilax or Greenbrier, and you get near them and they start to turbulent. They go like this, and they have orange on their undersides. If you get really near, they blow on them, they all leap off the leaf, they dangle from threads and they wiggle side to side like this. Now I don't know if these things actually are poisonous, but I know that any bird that wants to eat a caterpillar after it's wiggled, left, thrived around, has orange and white and black, it deserves a meal. Maybe this is the weird out defense. You might be noticing a pattern here, I keep saying defense, right? The first one was colorful to show that it was poisonous, it's defense. This one's dramatic, contrasting, wiggly, maybe to show that it's poisonous, but it's a defense. This one is defending itself very differently. This is the lace-capped caterpillar, pretty common around here. It's an over-feeder, and it mimics the edge of the dying wolf leaf in the fall. There's a whole bunch of caterpillars that become more common in August and September that mirror these late season leaves. I never knew, never recognized how dramatic and diverse our leapscape gets over the course of the year. In the spring, all of our caterpillars are green and squishy, and they sit on green leaves. By mid-summer or fall, we start seeing all of these fungal spots and reds and crinkled edges, because leaves are getting really battered throughout the year. I don't think it's a bad thing. I mean, they're sort of getting painted with fungus and galls and everything else, and the caterpillars reflect that. Here's another example. This is a big caterpillar. The four horned sphinx mimics an entire rolled up elk leaf. On dry ears, it's brown. On light ears, it's green. Not just looking like your food, but dressing up in it. This is the decorator emerald, extremely common caterpillar. The daisy flea vein is just coming out right now. Go look on daisy flea vein, and probably two weeks will be maybe the height of it, and you'll find these caterpillars covered in white petals. They pick a petal, decide, am I gonna eat this, or am I gonna stick it to my back with silk. This way they can be camouflaged on whatever plant their mother lays them on. Is there a caterpillar? Yes, they are all the time, absolutely. The same one. The same one, yeah. It's one caterpillar up here. There's a southern and a northern one. The BBC has now been to the lab three times to film this caterpillar. I mean, these are unique. There's no other decorator caterpillar in the world. So we keep talking about defense. I mean, why isn't this dressing up in pretty colors to attract a mate? What is it about a caterpillar that lets us know this is a defense? What do you think? I don't think they're natural. Right, it hasn't gone through its metamorphosis yet. It doesn't need to care about being attractive or defending sort of breeding territory. It eats, it poops, it grows, and it survives. And that means that when we see all these colors and textures, all these strange behaviors, looking like a twig, putting flowers on your back, looking like a leaf being incredibly brightly colored with a caterpillar, we know that that's a defensive adaptation. And we owe those interactions between caterpillars and predators for the diversity of colors and textures and bells and whistles we see on these caterpillars. We owe them for the sort of humor that caterpillars have. I mean, some of the funniest caterpillars to us are designed to strike terror into the hearts of birds. Like the furcula. I mean, I can't tell you exactly why having inflatable red tassels that they wave around their head and defend this caterpillar, but we know that's what it's for. And they're certainly not trying to impress each other right now. This actually gets to one of the reasons metamorphosis is good for caterpillar, one of the benefits of this whole process, that by separating life into these discreet chunks, changing completely in between, you can be the very best larva that you can possibly be, or the very best pupa, or the very best adult without having to consider what you once were or what you'll become. Human beings can't do this. Our babies need to have big heads. It's not very convenient. If we could drop our children off at the pool as tadpoles and come pick them up later, it might be really nice for humans, but it's not in our evolutionary history, but it's in theirs. All right, here's the strangest of all. This is the Harris's three spot. You look on Winterberry and the honeysuckle, you can find these. There's no caterpillar like this anywhere else on the planet. It wears its old head capsules as a cat. They shed their skins. They shed their heads. This one keeps them and it gets you with them when you get in the air. It also, we had our rear end view here. This is a Phidipus Otis jumping spider mimic. It's a perfect mimic of a jumping spider. And the last thing this caterpillar does when it's ready to pupate it for, straight into solid wood, it can go right into a two by four. And for a while, as it's excavating its chamber to pupate, the only thing on the surface is this jumping spider part, right here. It looks like a little jumping spider sitting there. So caterpillars, for their own sake, are really wonderful, charismatic, humorous, inspiring creatures. We don't actually have to look at how they grow and change or have to look across their ecological connections to appreciate them. They're just simply wonderful things. I get asked all the time, why should we care about caterpillars? And people want me to say, because birds eat caterpillars or because they do this or that, I care about caterpillars because a monkey slut is an amazing animal. Look at that thing. And that lives in our backyards. You may not see them, but they're there every once in a while. Hydraulic tentacles, fuzz, no legs. They just undulate on this disc. So it's always important to me when I'm going into a talk about the ecological significance of caterpillars, just to celebrate them first for what they are in of themselves. Off to the races here. You might not want to touch that one. So here's another one. I gave a talk down in Texas. One thing is, I never expected to be giving talks on caterpillars, but I first got invited to butterfly festivals, Motha Palooza, should look that one up. Garden groups. And I got to travel a little bit. And I went down to Texas, did some caterpillar searching and found huge grass pellets, found the size of rabbit poop under a vine. Looked around, didn't find a caterpillar, but decided to come back later because I had a feeling I knew what it might be. Came back later and there's this hot dog-sized sphinx caterpillar called the Goddy Sphinx. And we grabbed it, we took it all to the programs, we let it go again, but it was just an inspiring, huge animal. And at our first program with it, this little girl taps me on the elbow and says, it's winking at me. And I'm like, you know, that's nice. You know, it's a false eye, but that's nice imagination. And then I looked down and the thing was winking at us. So it's got a little reflective disc right there and somehow the species is evolved, a little muscle to make it twitch. It's okay though, it also has eyes on the front of it. This thing is a rattlesnake mimic. It gets many times the size it needs to get just to be the size of mouth it'll be. It's using size and false eye spots and scale pattern to stay safe from predators. So yeah, I think I've convinced you caterpillars are awesome, right? Move on to the next part of the ocean. This kind of thing came everywhere with me. It was the centerpiece for every dinner we went to. It was just, could not get enough of this thing. How long does this come to be? How long did it take me as caterpillars? It was, so it was caterpillar for quite a while after we found it. I let it go as a wandering phase. Basically we think that this caterpillar basically takes on a lot of water and grows very big, very fast to suit its defense. But it's probably not, it doesn't have all the resources yet it needs to make the transformation to a mouth. Because the mouth is the same size or even smaller than some species in this genus we have here but the caterpillar gets a whole lot bigger. Does it rattle? It does, this one does not. Although the avid sphinx out there that also have a false eye spot, they rattle when you squeeze them. You got about this one. You know, maybe I should change my tops just to seriously think of a caterpillar video. It's really cool. Are they your triple, triple? Yes, these are real life tribbles or headless chickens or whatever else you want to say. This is the most famous caterpillar in the United States. This is a flannel lov. You wouldn't want to touch these but they're certainly interesting. We have one species around here. And again, just a remarkable thing that even though it stings us, I'm just glad we share the planet with these things that someone thought of as an alien for a Star Trek episode once they called them tribbles. So they don't stay as caterpillars forever. They don't stay static. It's actually one of the great things about insects for our programs is we don't just bring these still things. We bring things that are changing in front of people. So they might shed their skin, they're eating, they're pooping, they're shedding, they're puking, they're emerging as adults. They're just constantly changing and that happens very quickly. So in the course of one afternoon, we can go from this avid sphinx fourth instar that's mimicking a noxious soft-fly larva, the larva of a stingless wasp, regurgitating orange fluid to the snake mimic stage. It just sheds its skin, it dries, new pigment sets in and we've gone from this to this. And this isn't just great for our programs. This is actually really significant for our ecology. This creature sits on top of leaves, out on the ends of branches. This creature sits underneath the leaves on the vines and the dappled shade where birds might discover it, suddenly see that eye and run away. They're acting differently in the world. They're acting with slightly different ecological lives. That means this one species is acting as sort of many species just in its caterpillar stage. I do like to try and include all the moments of metamorphosis here as we go through. So this is how the caterpillars start out. These are eggs developing just over two days. The first thing you see in a developing egg is the eyes. Then you see the mandibles. This one's gonna have these little antlers. And unfortunately for time-lapse video, they do hatch relatively quickly compared to how they develop. So they sort of just disappear from the eggs. But right from the beginning, this is where change happens. The eggs have their role in the environment. The caterpillars hatch. And when they first hatch, they're squishy and they're soft and they can change their appearance and their form right after hatching. Those ones have these little tiny antlers. They inflate into these great, big, branching things. Antlers inflate from along their body. And for their first two instars or growth stages as caterpillars, they look like sort of a little centipede with antlers. As they get big enough for birds to start taking interest in them, they're shedding those away and they become a leaf edge. So again, different lives just in the course of caterpillar growth. Here's the sacropia caterpillar. I'm just gonna use this as an example of all of this growth. It hatches from its egg. It's a little black caterpillar that lives in groups as it starts to get bigger, shed its skin. Those groups separate. They go off as individuals by their time. They are green with red and blue. They're on their own. Then they get really big. These guys get the size of breakfast sausages. There are largest native caterpillar here. And that's not it. It's not just going through these different caterpillar stages. They keep going. They keep changing. They spin a cocoon. That cocoon has its own ecology. Things use these cocoons. They become a pupa. And eventually they become the sacropia moth. Which in our caterpillar course yesterday, we identified as one of the most inspirational insects in New England. Many people in the class gave me stories about how this moth seeing this species inspired them to become more involved in nature. This thing that lives right here. So the caterpillar in its various stages, the pupa, the adult, all operating as almost separate species connected by the fact that it's all part of the same life cycle and one generates the next, but not connected necessarily in how they interact with the rest of the world. This is how all of metamorphosis happens. To go through those changes, doesn't happen magically. It happens just like this. You grow a new body underneath your old skin and you shed away the old. Right now this caterpillar, it grew a new layer of skin, new feet which are crawling forward right now, new breathing tubes, which are pulling out of the caterpillar's body right now. A new head, the old head is gonna fall off in just a moment. This is where you realize that going through these stage changes, becoming the best at the life stage you're at, by separating them out, it must be a huge advantage because this looks like a big disadvantage right here. Does this look easy? I mean, internal and external features all shedding away just to get a little bit bigger. There goes the head. My job at a caterpillar program is to get people so worked up as it's shedding that when the head finally falls off, we have hooting and cheering. So, hatching from an egg. It's like growing a new body in the old shell of the egg and hatching out, shedding your skin, getting to be a big caterpillar, growing a new caterpillar body, shedding the old away, and then we'll see what happens next. You got a question? I mean, even the eggs themselves, like isn't there a massive variety of what they look like and how others choose spots for them or how they survive? Even that egg's eggs is a monster. Yeah, so we're right now, we're sort of talking about just the variety within one species' life, but we have probably 5,000 species of these in New England. So just in the egg, not all eggs are the same, absolutely. There are eggs that are pasted together with a special shellac. There are eggs that are inserted into wood, inside plant stems, eggs laid in these huge wraps. Those eggs also get totally devastated by egg parasitoid wasps and then those get saved by hyperparasitoid egg parasites. It's crazy, we're gonna look at that in a minute. Gotta get ahead of myself. Just in the shedding, there's a lot of discoveries to be made. If you get a chance to watch this stuff in motion, it takes about 5 minutes, maybe 10, but we can certainly have it happen at a program. No one ever had actually witnessed how a Harris's three-spot caterpillar hangs on to its old egg. So last year I stayed up till 2 in the morning, watching a caterpillar getting ready to shed. I went to the bathroom and it shed its skin. But then next week I stayed up till 2 in the morning and I got it. So this is the pro thoracic shield right here. It's a hard part. In the back of the caterpillar, it slides down the face, locks on the head capsule and this is already mounted on the hairs on the new pro thoracic shield. So undergoing an orthosis? In every way, really. It's not changing its overall body plan, which is sort of what we've usually separated the stages as. Larva, a caterpillar, pupa and adult. But it is building a new layer of skin. The new layer of skin separates from the old is building a new whole system of breathing tubes. They separate from the old, a new forehead and a hind gut. And those changes happen in a similar way. There's an internal structural change that goes on in the development of the pupa stage and the adult stage, which goes beyond what's happening. So this is a hairy caterpillar. Every hairy caterpillar after it sheds has to do a little dance to get those hairs up and armed. This one also needs to get those head caps that's fully extended so it can whack things with them. So after it finally pulls out here. This is like hardware. So when these really hairy caterpillar shed, they sort of look like wet, oiled seals and then they do this incredible dance and everything just poofs right up and they're ready to go. So we were talking about metamorphosis in the different stages. So this is how we go from caterpillar to pupa. And there's so many misconceptions about this. Every time you hear about something about being a pupa, people say a caterpillar builds a hard shell around itself and then changes within. It's really the opposite of that. They become the pupa inside of themselves. Internally, their bodies reorganize. They get a new layer of skin that's not a caterpillar skin anymore. It's the pupa skin. And everything that was a caterpillar sheds away external. So I hate to say it, but National Geographic, the BBC and especially, I'm sorry, Radio Lab got this totally wrong. But it's really, it's still just as interesting as the mythology that they're building a shell and melting down and reforming. They're doing all that internally. They're becoming the pupa inside their bodies. And then the caterpillar head splits in half and the caterpillar legs shed off the body and the caterpillar breathing tubes pull out. And what's left behind is the pupa body, something that doesn't look like a caterpillar even remotely. It actually looks like the adult moth. So here's the head of the pupa, where the head of the adult moth can be. Here's an antenna here, and the antenna here, wing buds. It's not an adult moth yet. The wings can't fly, the antenna can't sense, but it's got all the blueprints. It's sort of a reorganizing stage. But the pupa, as you can see as it's wiggling around and still soft, it's not a pod, it's not a shell, it's just the animal itself, it's the next life stage. And going back to sort of the ecological role a little bit, a pupa is as different from a caterpillar with how it interacts as possible. A lot of pupa are formed underground where their main predators are moles and bulls and things like that. Some pupa are formed inside wood where you might have centipedes as predators. Some pupa are formed in cocoons that the caterpillar prepared for themselves before they pupated, and those cocoons often get taken over by other animals. So you'll see a predated or pond-sacropia cocoon open it up and find spiders. The big bat cocoons that some sacropia caterpillars make get taken over by mice in the winter. I'm gonna skip a few of these because you might have seen a monarch close and got a pupae before, but we just want to make sure we fit everything in today. I'm not doing very good at skipping these things though. And of course, there is the final, last big moment for these creatures, which is to come out of the pupa to develop into an adult moth. Again, grow a new body inside the old pupa body and new skin and come out. Now, why am I so interested in this idea? I mean, I'm supposed to, well, someone was supposed to be talking about pollination, right, an ecological service. Well, I like looking at metamorphosis like in detail like this because in each stage, again, they're leading those different lives. They're interacting with different things and they're able to provide different ecological services for each stage. So as a caterpillar, they're eating lots of leaves. They're moving energy up from the base of the food web, spreading it around, making leaves like oak leaves that we can't eat into more valuable meat for everything else. As a pupa, well, mostly they just sit there, but we talked about some of the ways that pupas use, but then a lot of moths and butterflies are pollinators as an adult. So a completely different role in our environment. So things like growth and metamorphosis can be like super organisms in their own right. One organism acting as many in the way it interacts with the world. So has anyone seen any of these moments in their lives and egg hatching, a pupa closing or forming? Any, what species was it, you know? Monarch. You know, I filmed every moment of a monarch's life two years ago and they are hard to tell. A lot of these species have little tells where you know like, oh, we're five minutes away for something. Monarchs were just, they sit there, you turn your back and something happens, so. We're not on good terms with them. Interesting, I didn't see that. The one thing I noticed was that the tentacles on the monarch caterpillar will hollow out and shrivel when you're in like the same hour, but didn't really get the five minute down. I never saw that. I know when it's happening, they extend out and become more linear so that the shed happens more easily. So remember us talking about the caterpillars inflating those antlers after they hatch? That's another feature of metamorphosis. They get to change form even more because they're very soft bodied after they shed their skin and they can inflate structures. So in this case, instead of inflating antlers, we're inflating the wings. They're pumping the wings full of fluid and they'll dry them. That's something I've never really heard highlighted, this idea that after shedding through inflation, they can create new structures, but when you see this smooth little caterpillar become spiky with antlers, just through a little bit of movement of caterpillar blood, it's definitely worth mentioning. So we're ready to move on to acknowledge that there's a rest of the world out there. This is the tobacco horn worm. It's one of my favorite caterpillars. Anybody else love this? Oh, yeah, I'm good. Anybody else not love this caterpillar so much? This eats anything in the tomato family, so tobacco, tomato, pepper, eggplant, all kinds of things that we like to eat. So sometimes we don't get along well, but it's one of my favorites. This is a big caterpillar in New England. It's in a lot of backyards and farms close to where we live. You get near and it clicks its mandibles and it thrashes side to side. It's a really poor organism, but it's also got some really wonderful and complex relationships with the rest of the world. So this caterpillar, I like to say that it's a horticulturalist, a farmer, and a host. It's a lot of roles to play. It's a horticulturalist because it's been doing this for a very, very long time. The genus Manduka has been eating the family soul in ACA, the tomato family, for thousands upon thousands of years. These plants, what makes a soul in ACA plant what it is, the textures, the leaf shape, the chemicals in its leaves has a lot to do with what's been eating it. So tomato family plants are pretty toxic. They've come up with ways to keep herbivores from eating them. And for a while some of those plants are successful and things like the hornets stop eating them, but then they overcome those toxins and they start eating them again and the plant has to take it up a notch and the caterpillar ever comes and the plant takes it up a notch and over evolutionary time, we end up with really toxic plants and really savvy caterpillars that can eat almost any chemical they can throw at them. So these can now eat nicotine. They eat tobacco plants and they don't just pass nicotine out of their bodies, they actually store it as a gas near their breathing holes and they burp it at predators when they're attacked. And there's a great research article called Toxic Halitosis by the Tobacco Farmers. So this act of eating tomatoes, shaped tomatoes and many of the flavors in tomatoes that we enjoy are directly linked to defensive chemicals against herbivory that evolved in response to tobacco hornet. This is even more clear with the cabbage white and the cabbage or the brassica family. That bitter taste that's in our broccoli, in our cabbage, in our Brussels sprouts, all of that and mustard. That's a defensive chemical against herbivory by things like the cabbage white caterpillar. So maybe we can't thank them for tomatoes as they're devouring them to the ground, but over evolutionary time, they're responsible for these plants being interesting to us in the first place, interesting enough to cultivate and grow for ourselves. They're a farmer because they don't stay as a caterpillar forever. We've already seen this once, but there's something different about the pupa that's emerging as it sheds the caterpillar skin away. Can you see the tusks this one has? By the way, what you're watching here every cornworm does this. Those cornworms in your tomato patches, if you've got them, they're going underground and they're going through this process, which when you actually take the time to look is pretty much one of the most amazing things you can ever witness. So we often take things that are common or around us for granted. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating or inspirational or, I don't know, I mean some audience members might say grotesque, but impactful, let's say. So at this stage now, we've got the short little nubbin here. Watch what happens. Remember we were talking about inflation earlier? That's the tongue chamber. This species will have up to a four-inch-long tongue twice the length of its body. It has the longest tongue of any pollinator in New England. So it's pollinating plants that other insects can't pollinate. It actually pollinates a lot of the plants it eats as a caterpillar. They will pollinate deterra, tobacco, any of these trumpet-like flowers with that tongue. So in a way, these guys are doing a service for the plants they ate as a caterpillar. They eat the plants as a caterpillar, they spread it around as an adult. Now in this instance, I'm not sure the plant knows what's going on. It's got a nice, you know, devoted pollinator here, but probably doesn't want to be eaten by the caterpillar. Next stage though, we've got these things called flower caterpillars here in New England, shinia. This is the golden-rod shinia. The moth of the golden-rod shinia rests on goldenrod all day long, the caterpillar eats goldenrod. The evening primrose shinia, that eats evening primrose seeds and fruits, but then the moth sits actually in a flower all day and it's camouflaged, that flower, it's bright yellow in paint. Those are devoted pollinators to those plants. That's a real service to that plant. And in some cases, we've seen that actually evolve into a mutualism rather than this sort of contentious, I'll eat you and maybe I'll pollinate you too. In the yucca plants is the yucca moth, the yucca grows extra seed, extra material for the caterpillars to eat in order to keep them close and have this devoted pollinator when they become a moth. So we talked about pollination. I'm curious. All right, so that's sort of the rose aside. Caterpillars interacting with plants, right? So they have these really complex relationships, these really old relationships with the plants they eat. That's side number one. They also have complex and old relationships with the things that eat them. This is a sucropia caterpillar covered into kinnid fly eggs, a parasitic fly that will hatch and burrow into the body. You can see where they've been burrowing in. This is a native fly. Sucropias are food for many, many things. But look really closely, some of these fly eggs have something weird going on. Hold on, these guys. It's not where the fly hatched. Parasitic wasps came out of these fly eggs. An egg parasite on the fly egg and an egg parasite on the back of a sucropia. So just looked at all the sort of complexity of a relationship with a plant. Now we're seeing that a fly might parasitize a sucropia, a wasp might parasitize that fly egg. And none of this is actually exceptional at all for nature. This is sort of the rule rather than the exception. You look closely at the lives of the creatures out there and you see all kinds of bizarre things that have happened over time. Creatures using creatures using creatures, nested relationships. I bothered to look closely at this. I'd never done this before. I kept these fly puparium. I wanted to see the fly emerge and dry its wings. I stared at it for many, many hours and eventually the puparium popped open. The fly came out and I learned that flies use a face pump to pump up their wings. Their nose is especially swollen and flexible. When they come out, they move it in and out and their wings get bigger. A lot of people who love caterpillars are not such big fans of parasitize. I understand that. I've gotten some really amazing caterpillars that I'd love to experience that erupt into other things, but it doesn't mean they're not interesting. You take the time to look at these things and explore their relationships. There's a lot of inspirational stuff going on there. All right, this one's hard for me. This is an avid space, one of my favorite caterpillars and it is erupting with Berconna and wasp blood. It's also my first use of emojis in the video. So from the perspective of these wasps, this is a huge moment. They're going from being a parasite, living inside the caterpillar, eating unessential parts to emerging to do, really this is the most daring moment of their lives. They're leaving their nursery. They've got to come out, spin their cocoons, pupate and emerge as adult wasps. And the first thing they do when they get out is just so I said they spin their cocoons and it can be actually a beautiful moment. So hold on a minute, we'll get past a little bit more of this. Keep thinking I should take this particular clip out. Yeah. Caterpillar's still very much alive there. Yeah, here it is. One little loop at a time, these wasps larvae spin their cocoons on the back of the caterpillar and they have to spin their cocoons very quickly because guess what? There's another wasp looking to lay eggs in there. The caterpillar's relationship with the plant, the wasp's relationship with the caterpillar, the hyperparasitoid wasp's relationship with the parasitoid wasp, these nested relationships, these specific relationships, these amount of these relationships. This is what holds nature together. This is what creates a sustainable environment that we can count on. If the caterpillar gets too common or very common, the wasps that use it do really well. If the wasps that use it do really well, the hyperparasitoids do really well and the populations all moderate each other. Instead of getting these big booms of populations devouring everything in these big crashes, we end up with sort of a wave. The more relationships, the more specific they are in our environment, the better off we are, the more productive our world is. This sort of brings it all together. This is an egg I got from my backyard. I grow tomatoes for the hornworms and I got a hornworm egg on it. Collected the egg, brought it to a program expecting to see a hornworm develop. Instead, we watched as three wasps of two different species develop in a single hornworm egg. Send this around to researchers. No one's ever seen anything like this. We've got a big black wasp, these two little ones. We don't know the story. Do the little ones follow the big black one around so the big black one can chew out of the egg and free them at the end? Are they hyperparasitoids on it? In my view, there was a second one that they consumed. Or is an egg just enough space for all these wasps just to get along inside? But this level of detail, it's not only important for the environment, but it's dynamite for educational purpose. And it's from my backyard. And it's from hornworms, which we all assume we know everything about, but researchers have never seen this. So we just got to break this assumption that there isn't a magnificent world to discover right outside and just start looking a little closer. So this is just to celebrate parasitoids a little bit. Again, as much as I love caterpillars, there's some really fascinating parasitoids. This is an adult ignominated wasp coming out of the pupa of a geometric or inchworm caterpillar. Here she comes. A little beautiful. Here's one that came from a woolly bear. That's a hard sell. Wasps coming out of woolly bears. People really love their woolly bears. Here's one that came out of the xanthotype. We found two of the caterpillars which can host this today on our walk. And one that came out of a gall. So a gall made by a caterpillar, formed by a caterpillar that ended up producing wasps that were using that caterpillar. All right, let me just do a time check. 720, you guys good to go on with some of these stories? How are you doing? Thumbs up. Okay. This is a story that we've told again and again and again today. Did anybody see the caterpillars being tended by ants out there? So this butterfly here, this is called the cherry gall azure. It was only identified as a species in 2005. Before that, it was thought it was probably just a spring azure or a summer azure. Any number of these little blue butterflies that look similar to each other. And it wasn't until we looked at its whole story and we started looking back in time and across its relationships that we realized it was something new. In fact, it doesn't eat blueberry flowers and dogwood flowers like the spring azure. It's not really fond of summer spirea like the summer azure. It only eats the galls of mites on cherry leaves. A mite interacts with the plant leaf. It causes it to grow this fleshy protrusion. The mites live inside of it. And this caterpillar right here loves to eat those mite galls. I'm not really too close to mites to understand how they might feel about it. I think they just get, I mean, I do think they get eaten, right? They're eating the whole gall. So I imagine we could consider this an omnivorous caterpillar. Now, I had no idea whether this caterpillar was a common one when we first heard about it, whether it's something I was ever gonna see, but I still went out and I checked cherry trees and I found cherry galls and I looked at those and I wasn't having very much luck until I remembered that this whole group of caterpillars likes to attract ants. They feed ants. The ants sort of treat them like milk cows and protect them from predators. And as soon as I started looking for ants on galls on cherry leaves, I started running them everywhere. And their season is right now. So if you can find some black cherry with galls, you'll find these caterpillars. The ants come up to them and tickle them and the caterpillar will often give them a little sugar droplet. But I'm giving you the simplified version. There's some weird stuff going on here. This is actually not the cherry ball azure. This is the silvery blue caterpillar that we've had under our microscopes out there. The ant is tickling the caterpillar, asking for food. And the caterpillar might apply. Caterpillar from right here will often give a little droplet of sugar water, right like this. But that's not just sugar water. It's sugar water laced with dopamine. And it makes the ants sort of easy to manipulate. It makes them sort of easy going. They'll still attack me when I try and grab the caterpillar, but they're just not too concerned about it. Most of the things ants are normally concerned about. And then once they've drunk from that gland and they have the dopamine in their bodies, they're very attracted to a chemical that comes out of this other thing, the tentacular organs that pop out of the caterpillar spray something that makes the ants super excited and happy. And it's basically addicting the ants to the experience. Now in some cases this might remain as a mutualism where the caterpillar feeds the ant and the ant protects the caterpillar and they're both benefiting. But in some cases we know that the ants get so enthusiastic about these chemicals here that they don't go back to their nest. They don't feed each other. They don't feed the queen. They don't do any of the things that are good for the colony. They just become the mindless, rather doped army of the caterpillar. When I start this conversation, usually people assume somehow the ants are the bad actors. Like they're duping the caterpillar, but no, it's this wonderful squishy caterpillar that does that. So how is that a defense mechanism for the caterpillar? Ants, when they've got a food source, they defend it viciously. So soon as the caterpillar starts feeding at this sugar water, it sort of becomes that food source. An ongoing source of nectar. Aphids do this too. And if the ant wants that nectar source to stick around, it's gonna defend it against wasps, against parasites, even against me. So when I collect these caterpillars, they're all over my hands, Mike. And then those animals have to find a way to do the ants in a place where they're not going to help. Essentially, they can make themselves look like these little little aphids being ant defendants. They're not gonna see ants. They're gonna get to them. Yeah, I don't know enough about the aphids and the ants. It may be that those are also locked in this sort of weird little transition between mutualisms and parasitisms. But with the ants and the caterpillars, the caterpillars do so much chemical manipulation that probably it's more often sort of a parasitic relationship than a mutualistic one. All right, given the time, because I want to take questions, I'm gonna skip ahead through our goldenrod galls. But you should know that goldenrod galls are really cool. And that they have all kinds of things inside them, not usually just caterpillars, but strange stories of parasitoids and warrior-caste parasitoids. And that you can find those in your yard as well. But I wanted to end with a discussion about this creature just to try and get a little bit of a perspective change here. This is the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. The Eastern Tent and the Forest Tent, you could think of it as crucial organisms in New England forests. We've got the life cycle from the hatchling down to the final in-star caterpillar, which is wonderful blue and gold, cocoon and pupa as armads here. And as they're growing and eating, they're doing a lot for a New England forest. They can eat a lot. I mean, has anyone had these in their cherry trees or apple trees? Yeah, it's not great for the individual tree. But they do back a lot too for all they eat. They've been eating New England forests for a very, very long time. And because of that, many creatures have evolved to use them. It's not easy to use a tent caterpillar though. They eat cherry and they synthesize hydrogen cyanide from the cherry. Each one of these things is like a cyanide panel. The yellow hairs on their body gum up the inner workings of a bird's stomach so birds on the whole can't eat too many of them and still get nutrients from other food. But we have things like the yellow-built cuckoo, which migrates here to New England just in time to raid the big nests of these, eat every caterpillar and they're just fine. They're immune to hydrogen cyanide and they regurgitate their stomach lining once it's matted with hairs and get a new one. So that bird has evolved to use this caterpillar as have hundreds of species of parasitic wasps and flies. So many that when you have a real outbreak here of tent caterpillars, within one or two years the population crashes again. So they are boomer-bust, but they bust quite a lot because of their interactions with other species. Not the end of the story though. When they are defoliating, that's not actually a bad thing. The way they defoliate boomer-bust years, maybe one year out of 10, they're killing off maybe one to 2% of the weakest trees once every decade. When they studied sugar bushes, maple tree sort of branches, I don't know quite what to call them, that were being eaten by forest tent caterpillars, they showed that 20 years after defoliation, the forest was more productive than forests that had been sprayed and all the forest tent caterpillars killed. That extra one to 2% of trees, they're the weaker trees, the understory trees that were never able to compete. And they're some of the older trees that are passed when they were being most productive. So defoliation event by a native caterpillar can act a lot like a low-grade wildfire and help maintain the health of the forest rather than herd it. That's very different though than what we see with a non-native caterpillar that hasn't evolved in this area and isn't part of a larger whole story. So the gypsy moth is a cool caterpillar. It goes through all the changes we were looking at. You can imagine when this head capsule pops off and it comes out with all those hairs and does its dance and wipes its hairs all over its venom glands. Just as interesting to watch grow as any other caterpillar, but it's not from around here. It didn't evolve in our forests. And when it eats all of those trees, it doesn't give back nearly as much. In fact, before people introduced some biological controls for it, almost nothing interacted with the gypsy moth. It was sort of alone here. Out of its place, out of its time, and the way it can defoliate year after year after year out of control over broad areas instead of leaving the healthier forest that leads to forest decline. So in the exact opposite way than the forest tank caterpillars, when they looked at forests that had been sprayed by pretty harsh chemicals in the 80s to kill off all the gypsy moths in those forests, 20 years down the line, the forests that were sprayed were more productive and biodiverse than the forests that were left to be defoliated and killed. So that's not an advertisement for pesticides. There's all kinds of other things that pesticides can cause in the water table. I don't know how that ended up. But the idea is that in a species like this with no natural controls that isn't part of a whole story, sometimes actually taking action against it, working to control it is absolutely the right idea. We tried that in 1906 though. A long time ago, people introduced a fly called Pocillura. There's a parasitic fly from Europe that used gypsy moths where they came from. They introduced them and they absolutely did use gypsy moths. They also used over 300 species of our native Lepidoptera and other insects. And in fact, in those 1980 outbreaks of the gypsy moth, there were so many of those flies around using our native species that we lost quite a few from New England. The regal moth, totally extirpated from New England. The imperial moth, all throughout Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire and Southern Vermont, that subspecies is wiped out. Right now we're sort of excited because the imperial moth from a population up with state New York and Canada, it's a little bit smaller and it uses pine and it's showing up right here again. But these aren't the only two we lost. Countless caterpillars have been extirpated from New England because of this fly and other actions that we've taken. So it's a complicated story. As far as good guys versus bad guys, beneficial versus past and based on versus native, I like to show the comparison between the tent caterpillars and the gypsy moths because I think it's a really great way of seeing how two things that we might consider pests in our backyards because of their history in this area, we need to think of very differently when they're in our forests. One is actually a really beneficial keystone organism and one still is something that if we could get rid of in New England, our forests would be healthier, more diverse and more productive. It also challenges us to think a little bit about why we even define things as pests and beneficial as good guys in backyards. We think of the horn work, right? That long relationship with its plant, the parasitoids that use it, the fact that it's a pollinator as an adult, the fact that it's a native species, it's absolutely an ecological good guy. You should celebrate it, but if you wanna grow tomatoes, I can't argue that you should leave your horn worms on the tomatoes because they're gonna eat all the tomatoes. So often that discussion of good guy, bad guy, beneficial versus past, it has to do with what our reference frame is and we need to acknowledge that. Are we talking about the environment, the natural world? Are we talking about our gardens? Are we talking about a specific plant that we're holding above everything else in the world because we want a beautiful flower or beautiful tomato? I think it's okay to want those things, but I don't think it's okay to demonize a species that is actually a natural good guy for that one thing. So we need to remember to put that aside and appreciate these things for what they are. So who's raised monarchs or interacted with the monarch discussion? Cool. Monarchs are wonderful animals and they're a great example of where people have started to recognize the whole story. So many people recognize the caterpillars as they grow, the beautiful green chrysalids or pupae that they become, the adult monarchs, their need for nectar, the migration to Mexico, the need for milkweed to feed the caterpillars. That's all wonderful. My issue sometimes with the monarch sort of celebration that this country is going through is sort of twofold. One is that oftentimes the discussion, the sort of passion that monarchs build up stops with monarchs. This should be a gateway to everything else we've talked about. We need to celebrate the monarch's whole story. We need to preserve and preserve that whole story but we need to do that across the board. Biodiversity, the wealth of these interactions we've been talking about, that's what's gonna help preserve us, inspire us and it starts with the monarch but it can't end with the monarch. So those who work with monarchs in this room, I hope you'll try to push that a little bit farther and say, but wait, there's more every time you get into a conversation. The other problem I have with it is maybe one that'll help us harder sell but turns out that the fly maggots that burst out of monarch caterpillars to the great dismay of people raising them, it used to be thought that this one maggot was a generalist across many butterfly species. Now they're starting to recognize that it's actually a series of cryptic species and that this maggot specializes on monarchs. So if you have an animal that specializes on monarchs and it pops out of your monarch caterpillar and you slam your fists down on it because a maggot just killed your monarch caterpillar, what are we doing? That maggot needed that monarch caterpillar. If monarchs go extinct, that parasitic fly goes extinct. We need to recognize what the point is of protecting these animals. Is it just because monarchs are pretty and make us write poems and feel inspired or is it because they do represent something bigger, that whole story of their interactions with their plants and their parasitoids in our gardens, in our fields and in our forests? So I personally am interested in preserving the richness of all those stories together and I hope that one day I can convince people that having a maggot burst out of your caterpillar is an okay thing, but not today. So we need the bees to pollinate. Absolutely crucial for us on this planet but we also desperately need the wasps to pollinate and to eat a ton of caterpillars and parasitize a ton of caterpillars and other herb forests, making sure that the balance is preserved and we need our caterpillars to eat all those leaves and unlock all the energy from the sun that's in those leaves that few other organisms can successfully unlock. So this discussion on pollinators, the discussion on monarchs, I wanna move it to a discussion about how important biodiversity is, how important these connections are, that we should be trying to welcome this and experiment with it and learn it in our own backyards and project that outwards and hopefully get a sort of more stable landscape around us. So that's my talk for today. Thank you. It was a great impromptu keynote so I'm happy to take any questions yet. I'm gonna cuddle them and down to a lot of ways. So one thing I didn't quite talk about is sort of making value where you might assume there's none. So with a horn worm you've got many options. My favorite first is, you know, appreciate it for what it is. Think about it's story. Think about if you have some neighbor kids of school, anyone who might love the experience of raising this creature that you can set them up with. It's a really amazing experience. They might learn about metamorphosis, native species, parasitism. And if you want to, you can also just plant leafy potato, tobacco on the side of the yard, move them to that or even move them to climbing nightshade. Anything in the soul in ACA is fine for them and often we have climbing nightshade on the side of our yards. That said, you can also feed them to the chickens. I mean, it's okay. It's more just that I want everyone to realize that it's because we love our tomatoes that we don't like this caterpillar or not because it's a bad actor in the environment. We do get multiple buckets dropped outside the Caterpillar Lab every year full of horn worms. So if you're in our area, feel free to drop off your horn worms. Thank you. Pet store selling, but pets stores. Oh, the pets store is selling for a lizard. The ones that are grown by the pet stores do not, they don't raise them on the nightshade plants because... Which is curious because so many people feed them to their chickens and I've heard that the chickens love them, but they should be really toxic because they eat these incredibly toxic things. I don't want to believe whatever they're eating. If you were mentioning you, I think, sit over the parts like that with Golden Rodgall. I've done more Golden Rodgall, but I'd love to know more. I just wanted to say some more, actually. I'll tell you what, when we break, if you want, I'll just go through the slides. They're pretty amazing. You find parasitoids, hyperparasitoids, you social polyambryonic parasitoids. You find spiders overwintering in them. There's any number of outcomes from opening up a Golden Rodgall. And I like talking about it because it lets me say things like there's a wasp inside of a wasp, inside of a caterpillar, inside of a plant. It's just like, it just keeps going, right? Cool, yeah, that's, in the wintertime especially, if you just need some nature, go find these Golden Rodgalls and then you power line cut around here and do a little dissection and try and tell a story backwards because it's a little like a sleuthing. It's a lot of fun. Great project for schools as well. Any other questions? The monarchs are a multi-generational migratory, so what kind of generation is the correct one? What if you ship a cataclysm from Mexico? I don't think your cataclysm would go that way or try to go again. So there's a lot going on right now with this. So monarchs, they went to Mexico through multiple generations. They hop all the way up to Canada, right? So first generation, maybe in Texas, then southeast coast, then up and up and then the final generation goes all the way back to Mexico once. So it's that final generation that does the long migration. Right now, people are selling monarchs to weddings. Thousands of monarchs to be released from monarch farms from different parts of the country from Florida non-migratory populations. People are raising a lot of monarchs inside, hoping to preserve the species. A paper just came out showing that the monarchs that are released releases and the monarchs that are brought indoors and reared and released are less successful at migration than the ones in the wild. In fact, significantly less successful that they don't necessarily know what they're doing. Which makes a lot of sense to me. You take a monarch from one spot and you move it to another and what's it doing? Or you bring a monarch inside. It's experiencing different light, different conditions. How does it know what generations it's at? What's appropriate? I'm also just concerned when we move a lot of species around the country. What else are we moving? It's right for unintended consequences, basically. So I think that was most of your question there. There is another thing that's come up which I just find fascinating. So the whole monarch migration, the scale that we see it at on the East Coast, may actually be a human-built, a human-generated spectacle. So when we first came to this country, when Europeans came, this whole area was cleared. It was turned into epic milkweed habitat. Milkweed exploded across the landscape. The cowbirds came in from the center country. All kinds of prairie birds arrived. And monarchs would have thrived. This migration from this huge population boom set up down to Mexico. And one of the reasons people think this is actually a thing is when they look at the human history down where they are wintering in Mexico. There's no sign of monarchs at all before a few hundred years ago. No pottery, no hieroglyphics, nothing that suggests there would have been epic numbers of millions of monarchs. So there's a lot to think about. I mean, I think generally, I don't know the details or the truths of any of this, but life is complicated. And whenever you hear it put a little too simply, like plant milkweed and monarchs will be fine or monarchs are all dying because of this one thing. Just remember life is complicated. Well, thanks everybody. I'll hang out for a while if anyone wants to check.