Monarch Butterfly

Species

Macken Murphy

Nature, Social Sciences, Science

4.8 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2019

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This surprisingly poisonous animal is incredibly mysterious. They engage in migrations that take multiple generations, they gather together and use their combined weight to topple trees, and they have lived on the International Space Station. How do they migrate? How do caterpillars turn into butterflies? Find out on this episode of Species.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I've always been fascinated by projects that span multiple lifetimes.
0:07.1	It feels profoundly strange to even imagine working on something that started before you were
0:15.0	born and won't be finished until after you die.
0:25.3	Ancient cathedrals, I think, present good examples of this.
0:32.7	In some cases, these were construction projects that people planned and started knowing that they probably would not live long enough to see them finished. These were buildings where workers would put their entire life into them,
0:42.3	even though they were born after construction started and would die before it was finished.
0:49.5	A more depressing example would be wars.
0:53.7	Throughout history, people have been born into wars only to die before they ended.
1:00.8	We could talk about the Hundred Years War or the Roman Persian Wars or...
1:05.8	There are so many examples, but we don't need to look back very far if we don't feel like it. Burma has been
1:14.5	fighting a civil war arguably since the 1950s. Many people have been born into that war only to get
1:22.2	killed in it. And we don't even need to look at the other side of the world.
1:31.5	Last year we just passed a rather depressing landmark.
1:38.7	Americans born after 9-11 just became old enough to fight in the war in Afghanistan.
1:44.6	So some of those children, now barely adults, will die.
1:53.5	And so they will have been born after the war started, and they will have died before it's finished.
2:18.2	Let's just admit that there's something incredibly strange about people fighting to the death over a conflict they weren't even alive to witness the start of. More generally, there's something strange about being born in the middle of an ongoing project and dying before it ends.
2:24.3	I want you to imagine for a second if you were born in the middle of a journey.
2:30.5	Imagine you were born on a boat or a train or a spaceship, whatever you prefer.
2:39.2	You were born on this voyage, and the voyage is so long that you know you are destined to die before we even get there. You are the worker who doesn't see the start or end of
2:47.6	the cathedral. You are the soldier who doesn't see the start or the end of the war. Your
2:53.3	life is in limbo. A beginning and an end without a beginning or an end. Imagine waking up to the world
	...

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