So I think we should start by talking about what I think is maybe the most metal

insect I have ever heard of, the gum leaf skeletonizer.

Yeah, so the gum leaf skeletonizer lives in Australia.

It is a caterpillar that turns into a moth,

but before it turns into a moth,

it undergoes another transformation,

and it becomes a creature that people refer to sometimes as the mad Hatterpillar.

When this caterpillar molds, it sheds most of its old skin, but it keeps the head.

It's shedding its head case, the case kind of cracks from the bottom and like migrates up and

just stays on top of the new head and over time like over many molds

it becomes this head stack so each of the madhatter pillars has a stack of four or five heads that get increasingly smaller as they go up.

So it's like an ice cream cone of heads on top of its head.

Imagine if you went to meet your friend

and they just had a tiny skull from when they were like one, four, ten,

and like 20, like stacked on their heads and they were just like,

this is just how I go about life.

Like that is the mad Hatterpillar.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today I'm here with Karajaimo.

She is the co-author of Atlas Obscira's newest book, Wildlife.

We're going to talk about life in three different biomes,

islands, deserts, and cities.

...