The Caterpillar Who Dissolves Into Goo And Still Remembers
Depending on how old you are when you read this, I think most of us have experienced what it feels like to fall completely apart. For me, it happened when I was 30 years old and experienced my life-altering trauma. For caterpillars, I’d imagine it’s when they turn into mush before becoming a butterfly.
Think about your actual physical body unraveling, and not in heartbreak, but in the most literal, biological sense.
Your muscles liquefy, your guts swirl into a molecular soup, your nervous system, your actual state of self, begins to disassemble.
This isn’t death, although it sounds a hell of a lot like it, no, not quite, this is metamorphosis.
It’s what caterpillars do, I mean, it’s what they’ve always done.
The strangest part for me though is that when they emerge as butterflies, they still remember.
The Liquid Stage of Life
It all starts with one of my favorite instincts. A caterpillar feels the pull, not of gravity, but of becoming. It crawls to a high place, anchors itself, and begins to molt. What remains is a chrysalis: a tomb if you will.
Inside that capsule, the caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings…it digests itself. Enzymes are released that break down its internal structure into a rich, nutrient-dense fluid: yeah, a goo. Nearly every system liquefies, I mean, the brain, too, partially melts. In case this wasn’t clear enough, if you were to cut open a chrysalis at the wrong time, you'd find soup. A living soup, but still a form of goo nonetheless.
Here’s where biology brushes up against the surreal though, bear with me. In a groundbreaking 2008 study at Georgetown University, scientists (Martha Weiss with Blackiston et al.) trained caterpillars to associate a particular smell (ethyl acetate) with a mild electric shock. Over time, the caterpillars learned to avoid the smell. Like all caterpillars do over time, they eventually entered the chrysalis. When they emerged, transformed into moths, they still avoided the same scent.
So…even after melting their brains, the memory survived. If we’re being technical here, not all neural structures are destroyed in this process, and parts of the nervous system are reorganized, not erased. Some neurons don’t all vanish and are repurposed after the goo-stage, which showed that learned information can survive extreme bodily reorganization. It wasn’t anecdotal…it was repeatable. Memory, it seems, doesn’t always live where we think it does. It can’t in order for this to be a reality.
What Makes a Memory?
We like to think of memory as a storage unit: a locked drawer in the brain, holding images, words, and sensations for us that we can go on and open whenever we have need of it. If you can melt the drawer though, and still have the memory…what then?
Some scientists believe certain neural pathways survive the transformation. Not all of the brain dissolves completely; specific clusters, like parts of the mushroom body (an area related to learning and memory), might stay protected somehow and get rebuilt.
Others out there suggest something more radical though, that memory might be stored in molecular patterns, or in the epigenetic tags that linger even after cells are destroyed and re-formed. The implications of that shows that our memories might not just be in our brain. They might be in your body, in your cells…in your very construction. I mean, we’ve seen this in organ transplant recipients who suddenly start loving similar things their donor did.
There’s no stage of the caterpillar’s life more fragile, or more powerful, than the goo phase. This isn’t a transition in a traditional sense, it’s a full collapse. The form it once knew (segment by segment, muscle by muscle) is completely gone…yet something inside knows what to build next.
That’s where imaginal discs come in.
These tiny clusters of cells have been present in the caterpillar all along. Like seeds, they remain dormant until the right moment, then, in the chaos of liquefaction, they activate. Each disc contains the blueprint for a body part: wings, legs, antennae, etc etc. From a puddle of pure and utter chaos, the body is rebuilt, and it’s not built blindly. It’s built with direction, memory, with meaning.
We, too, have our goo phases. Maybe not in the biological sense, but in emotional, psychological, and spiritual ones. Breakups, grief, trauma, illnesses, moments when we feel like our former selves have dissolved…when the scaffolding of identity collapses. We say, “I’m falling apart,” and we are…but maybe that’s the point. I think that sometimes, like the caterpillar, we have to first become unrecognizable chaos in order to rebuild.
I’d like to think that our imaginal cells are the dreams we tucked away for a better future. They’re the versions of ourselves we never believed we could be, but wanted to be more than anything. Those versions of us can really only activate when everything else has melted.
The Strange Resilience of Memory
Even in our darkest, foggiest moments…something in us remembers. The scent of a parent’s shirt, the muscle memory of riding a bike, the ache of a song you haven’t heard in twenty years.
Like the butterfly, we carry echoes of who we were, even when we’ve completely changed.
You aren’t the same person you were ten years ago; your cells have turned over since then. Your thoughts have evolved, and your beliefs might’ve been torn down and rebuilt a long time ago.
Yet, something in you persists. Your body remembers, your heart remembers, and sometimes, so does your pain.
Science still doesn’t fully understand how butterflies remember. We know that some brain regions in insects remain partly intact, we suspect molecular signaling, perhaps epigenetic transcription, but we really don’t have a neat answer for me to give you.
Honestly though, I’m okay with that. This is one of those truths that lives best in the space between science and story, stuck between the microscope and the metaphor.
The butterfly teaches us that you can lose everything, you can literally melt into nothing, and can still come back, with wings.
Related Reads to Flutter Toward:
Feeling Worthless? Here’s Why the Odds of You Existing Are the Most Beautiful Miracle
The Elephant in the Cell: Why These Giants Rarely Get Cancer
The Sins of the Father: How Paternal Stress Etches Itself Into Sperm
Lost Keys, Brilliant Mind: Why Forgetting Might Mean You're Creative
We treat butterflies like symbols…tattoo them on ankles, doodle them on notebooks, release them at weddings and funerals, but they’re not metaphors. They’re real, and what they go through is more radical than any fable we’ve pinned to them.
They don’t just transform, they dissolve, they risk everything, and they come back with more than beauty, they come back with wisdom.
Their wings aren’t made solely of pigment and patterns, they’re made of memory.
We fear change because we mistake it for erasure, but the caterpillar reminds us that you can disappear and still carry the scent of spring. You can melt into goo and still know which way the wind blows, you can lose the plot, and still find your way home.
What feels like destruction might be your imaginal discs activating, and what feels like loss might be rearrangement.
You’re not breaking, you’re being rebuilt.
Watch Transformation With Your Own Eyes
Insect Lore Butterfly Growing Kit. Bring the miracle of metamorphosis to your windowsill. This kit lets you raise real butterflies and observe the goo phase in action, perfect for science lovers, homeschoolers, or anyone who’s ever felt themselves melting and rebuilding.
