The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal.

On heat summer season nights, inexperienced lacewings flutter round shiny lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The bugs, with their veil-like wings, are simply distracted from their pure preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hold from lengthy stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights within the wind.

The dangling ensembles of eggs are stunning but in addition sensible: They maintain the hatching larvae from instantly consuming their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” mentioned James Truman, a professor emeritus of improvement, cell and molecular biology on the College of Washington. “It’s like ‘Magnificence and the Beast’ in a single animal.”

This Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy is made attainable by metamorphosis, the phenomenon greatest identified for reworking caterpillars into butterflies. In its most excessive model, full metamorphosis, the juvenile and grownup kinds look and act like completely totally different species. Metamorphosis just isn’t an exception within the animal kingdom; it’s nearly a rule. Greater than 80 p.c of the identified animal species as we speak, primarily bugs, amphibians and marine invertebrates, endure some type of metamorphosis or have advanced, multistage life cycles.

The method of metamorphosis presents many mysteries, however a number of the most deeply puzzling ones heart on the nervous system. On the heart of this phenomenon is the mind, which should code for not one however a number of totally different identities. In spite of everything, the lifetime of a flying, mate-seeking insect could be very totally different from the lifetime of a hungry caterpillar. For the previous half-century, researchers have probed the query of how a community of neurons that encodes one id—that of a hungry caterpillar or a murderous lacewing larva—shifts to encode an grownup id that encompasses a totally totally different set of behaviors and desires.

Truman and his crew have now realized how a lot metamorphosis reshuffles elements of the mind. In a current research printed within the journal eLife, they traced dozens of neurons within the brains of fruit flies going by means of metamorphosis. They discovered that, in contrast to the tormented protagonist of Franz Kafka’s quick story “The Metamorphosis,” who awakes sooner or later as a monstrous insect, grownup bugs possible can’t bear in mind a lot of their larval life. Though most of the larval neurons within the research endured, the a part of the insect mind that Truman’s group examined was dramatically rewired. That overhaul of neural connections mirrored a equally dramatic shift within the conduct of the bugs as they modified from crawling, hungry larvae to flying, mate-seeking adults.

Their findings are “essentially the most detailed instance so far” of what occurs to the mind of an insect present process metamorphosis, mentioned Deniz Erezyilmaz, a postdoctoral analysis scientist on the College of Oxford’s Middle for Neural Circuits and Conduct who used to work in Truman’s lab however wasn’t concerned on this work. The outcomes could apply to many different species on Earth, she added.