Archives: October 2022

Earth Matters : Metamorphosis

By John Sinton

Early in life, I fell in love with metamorphosis when I collected caterpillars and placed them in jars with their preferred leafy food, then watched them transform into pupae and finally into butterflies. In high school biology I discovered that their magic shape-shifting lay deep in their evolutionary development, which allowed the immature and mature stages to occupy different ecological niches dining on different foods. This allowed one form of the insect to gorge on abundant, ephemeral food, fattening up before that next stage of its life began. In those same years, I also discovered the singularity of the Latin language when, in Mr. Hatch’s Latin class, we struggled to make sense of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”