joel klepac

A caterpillar spins its cocoon around itself, like a camper in a mummy bag, but unlike the camper, it then breaks down into a jelly.  The caterpillar does not somehow change caterpillar legs for butterfly wings, but rather goes through a middle formation stage.   It is more like a lego construction becoming something else only after returning to the pile of unconnected pieces on the floor.  Without microscopes the organism looks first like a caterpillar, then a blob of goo and then a butterfly.  “…new adult organs develop from undifferentiated nests of cells called, imaginal discs, which reconstruct the entire adult…” (Subramoniam, 2003, p. 132). more