Jakarta –
From Reddit, a forum on the internet, often has unique questions milling about. One of them is this one: whether vocabulary do they have memories of being caterpillars or are they newly born animals? This question was answered by biologist Professor Martha Weiss to NPR.
Humans generally have no memories of the first three or four years of our lives. However, as Weiss discovered in his 2008 research, moths and butterflies can retain memories from their time as caterpillars. Apparently, the creature’s nervous system remains during its transformation into a butterfly.
For this study, researchers from Georgetown University, including Weiss, released ethyl acetate into the caterpillars’ environment. The caterpillars are not bothered by the smell but the scientists trained the insects to react badly to it by delivering small electrical attacks.
They then offered the caterpillars a choice of air containing ethyl acetate, or regular air. As a result, as many as 78% of the caterpillars avoided ethyl acetate, even though they had not previously been affected by ethyl acetate. A month later, 77% of the moths chose to avoid ethyl acetate.
“The behavior represents true associative learning, not chemical inheritance, and, as far as we know, provides the first definitive demonstration that associative memory survives metamorphosis in Lepidoptera,” the team wrote in the study.
Therefore, it can be concluded, most of the nervous system is retained during transformation thereby allowing butterflies and moths to retain memories of their larval stages. This study was published in PLOS ONE, as reported IFLScience.
Watch the video “Fajar Nugra’s story about playing a character with a disability in ‘Paper Butterfly'”
(ask/rns)
2024-02-16 10:38:03
#Butterflies #Remember #Caterpillars
