Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
Martha shares a story about finding a monarch caterpillar and watching its metamorphosis in its gold-dotted chrysalis (from the Greek chrysos, “gold” as in the word chrysanthemum, meaning “golden flower”), to the butterfly’s eclosion, or “emergence”...
In an earlier episode, we talked about the butterfly mating behavior known as hilltopping, in which male butterflies try to appeal to females by flying as high as possible. A listener in Fairbanks, Alaska, reports that the term hilltopping is used...
Hiking in the mountains, Martha kept noticing butterflies at about 4,000-to-5,000 feet above sea level. Those butterflies are hilltopping. It’s when male butterflies of many species go to high points to advertise their fortitude and genes to the...
Some of the world’s greatest writers had to do their work while holding down a day job. William Faulkner and Anthony Trollope toiled as postal clerks. Zora Neal Hurston trained as an anthropologist. Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist who curated a...
Are fairy tales too scary for children? A survey of parents in Britain found that more than half wouldn’t read them to their children before age five. Martha and Grant discuss the grisly imagery in fairy tales, and whether they’re too traumatizing...