Once upon a time, Amazon Music met audiobooks and listeners everywhere rejoiced.

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Because now they could listen to one audiobook title a month from an enormous library of popular audiobook titles, including romanticity,

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listening. Terms apply. Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Ah, the butterfly, the fashion icon of the insect world is one of nature's most fascinating

shapeshifters. From early childhood, we marvel at this creature's transformative abilities,

changing from lowly crawling caterpillars into winged beauties in the space of just a few weeks.

In addition to being easy on the eyes, butterflies lack the drawbacks that make

so many other insects frustrating pests. They don't bite or sting or carry malaria. They can

even be good for our gardens. You hardly ever hear anyone complain about a butterfly infestation.

So when researchers released a flock of the insects on a remote island in the 1990s, they

did not expect any downside. Their goal was to study population bottlenecks. That's a term for

mass casualty events, like a natural disaster or a plague. If enough members of species die out,

these survivors might not have enough

genetic diversity to go on, but pinpointing exactly how much diversity is needed can be tricky.

In this case, the scientists were going to take a small population of butterflies and release

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