Goshen County Photographer: Out of the Soup and Into the Wind

What can being a photographer in Yoder, Wyoming, teach me?  Plenty.

One of the most amazing things in nature to me is the metamorphoses of a caterpillar into a butterfly.  It is one of the most radical transformations known to man.  In a matter of a few weeks, this bumbling worm like creature basically rots into some sort of primordial ooze and from that grows a butterfly.

I’m not kidding.  It’s a pretty gruesome process, best described by a Scientific American blog I read.

“First, the caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out. But the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on. In some species, these imaginal discs remain dormant throughout the caterpillar’s life; in other species, the discs begin to take the shape of adult body parts even before the caterpillar forms a chrysalis or cocoon. Some caterpillars walk around with tiny rudimentary wings tucked inside their bodies, though you would never know it by looking at them.

Once a caterpillar has disintegrated all of its tissues except for the imaginal discs, those discs use the protein-rich soup all around them to fuel the rapid cell division required to form the wings, antennae, legs, eyes, genitals and all the other features of an adult butterfly or moth. The imaginal disc for a fruit fly’s wing, for example, might begin with only 50 cells and increase to more than 50,000 cells by the end of metamorphosis. Depending on the species, certain caterpillar muscles and sections of the nervous system are largely preserved in the adult butterfly. One study even suggests that moths remember what they learned in later stages of their lives as caterpillars.”

This is a swallowtail butterfly my daughter released yesterday after the caterpillar we caught in our garden spun a cocoon.  To think that this incredible creature came from caterpillar soup…it boggles my mind.

There’s a metaphor in this.

Change is ugly.  It is gruesome.  It can break you down to the point of figurative goo.  But sometimes it’s exactly what is necessary for you to grow those wings so you can fly.

Teresa