Thursday through next Monday is your last chance to float through the Butterfly Habitat at Springs Preserve — it closes May 29. Sure, you can see butterflies in the wild, or in your backyard, but our desert rarely offers them up in such soothing abundance. Each one is a living treatise on transformation, fragility, fleeting beauty, and resilience.
What makes them such potent symbols of change is, of course, what happens in the cocoon: They enter as caterpillars and emerge utterly different. My inner 12-year-old thrills to the gross details: Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar essentially digests itself, releasing enzymes that dissolve its tissues into a protein-rich DNA gumbo: “If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out.” Then the butterfly forms out of the goo. (A lot like struggling through a bad hangover on a work morning, not that I would know.) It’s a scientifically fascinating process.
The dissolving isn’t always total — some caterpillar species have nascent wings tucked into their bodies pre-cocoon. And one study suggests certain moths can “remember what they learned in later stages of their lives as caterpillars.” My inner 12-year-old’s mind is blown. So see the butterflies before they’re gone.
