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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures,

ideas, and monsters in time.

This week on Weird House Cinema, we'll be discussing the classic 1964 kaiju movie Mothra

versus Godzilla, in which the great divine moth comes to humanity's defense,

despite humanity's obvious greed and corruption.

Originally introduced in her own self-titled 1961 movie, Mothra has continued to serve as a mainstay in the Godzilla franchise.

In the 1964 film, we see that Mothra's physical form continually experiences death and rebirth

via the hatching of an enormous egg.

In fact, the egg hatches to reveal twins, providing the great kaiju protector with a strategic advantage over Godzilla in their final fight, despite the

larval forms that she is restricted to. Now, this led me to wonder if natural world moths

ever hatch twins. Well, insects do on rare occasions produce genetic twins, but there are also

accounts of double cocoons among silk fonts.

As pointed out by Wang et al in the 2003 paper analysis of the movement of two silkworms

during the construction of double cocoons, published in the Journal of Insect, Biotechnology,

and Sericology, that's the study of silk, two mature larvae sometimes jointly

spin a large cocoon called a double cocoon in which they both develop into adults.

Furthermore, the practice seems to be more common in certain genetic strains of silkworm.

Environmental factors such as crowded confines also seem to play a factor.

Double cocoons are not ideal for silk production,

...