Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow

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Speaker 4 Hey, I'm Molly Webster. This is Radio Lab.

Speaker 4 So one of my first pieces at the show, like actually kind of my very first Molly piece, was this episode called Goo and You.

Speaker 4 It was about what happens inside a chrysalis when a caterpillar crawls in and a butterfly or moth crawls out. Like what happens in that middle space?

Speaker 4 And it's one of my favorite pieces because it feels like, I don't know, it's got like science and poetry and philosophy. And it's also just this meditation on what it means to change.

Speaker 4 And though it was my first piece, which happened over 10 years ago,

Speaker 4 it is still actually the piece that I get the most feedback about. Like I still get emails about it.
People want me to do workshops on it. It inspired some famous persons like wedding.

Speaker 4 And then a month ago, it popped up again when one of my editors was like, yo, Molly, this fabulous young radio reporter basically made a goo and you sequel. I listened to it.
It's great.

Speaker 4 It's a story that revisits the scientist, drags her whole family in to this kind of international tale.

Speaker 4 And then it becomes a meditation, not just about change in an individual, but across generations.

Speaker 4 And so what we want to do for you is play an excerpt of this piece. It's called Caterpillar Roadshow.
It's from this audio magazine called Signal Hill. And the reporter is Annie Rosenthal.

Speaker 4 So here's Annie.

Speaker 20 In the spring of 2022, my mom went into the mailroom at the university where she works in DC.

Speaker 14 In her box, there was a big flat envelope addressed to her, Martha Weiss.

Speaker 18 She didn't recognize the sender, Joe Nagai, J-O-No-E.

Speaker 18 Inside, there was a handwritten letter, four pages long.

Speaker 24 So, shall I read you part of the letter?

Speaker 15 Please.

Speaker 24 To Martha Weiss.

Speaker 24 Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Joe Nagai.
I'm from Japan. I live in Kobe, Japan.
I'm in the second grade at Ibuki Elementary School.

Speaker 24 When I found your research on the internet, I was so delighted.

Speaker 25 Two exclamation points.

Speaker 24 Two bold exclamation points.

Speaker 12 My mom is an entomologist.

Speaker 25 She studies insects.

Speaker 2 And she gets letters from strangers pretty often.

Speaker 23 They're mostly about this one study she worked on.

Speaker 13 She and her student were studying moths.

Speaker 12 And they figured out that an adult moth could remember something it learned as a caterpillar.

Speaker 13 Even after metamorphosis, the memory carried through.

Speaker 18 It made kind of a splash.

Speaker 4 What's your feeling like coming out of this?

Speaker 29 My feeling is, wow.

Speaker 30 This is my mom on Radiolab.

Speaker 29 I think it's amazing that a caterpillar can have an experience, go into its chrysalis, five weeks pass, emerge as a seemingly different organism,

Speaker 29 and that it still can recall experiences that happened to it when it was a caterpillar.

Speaker 31 Freaking cool, I gotta say.

Speaker 32 There were a lot of interviews like that and a lot of emails.

Speaker 19 But the letter my mom picked up that day at work was different from any of the fan mail she'd gotten before.

Speaker 35 For starters, the author was a kid in second grade, writing from the other side of the world.

Speaker 37 But more importantly, he was writing to tell her that he was an insect scientist himself.

Speaker 39 In the letter, Joe described his discoveries.

Speaker 24 I've studied swallowtail butterflies for three years.

Speaker 38 In kindergarten, he'd investigated how long a swallowtail butterfly could stay alive if it got stuck in the chrysalis.

Speaker 41 In first grade, he'd found caterpillars that molt more often than usual.

Speaker 18 But now, Joe said, he was hoping to try something a lot more complicated.

Speaker 24 I've always thought that my butterflies could remember me even after their metamorphosis, because they always flutter around me whenever I try to let them go into nature.

Speaker 24 But sadly, some say that's impossible and ridiculous. I have some questions to you.
Have you ever experimented in swallowtail butterflies?

Speaker 24 I want to try to find if a swallowtail butterfly could remember what it learned as a caterpillar.

Speaker 17 Joe, an eight-year-old, wanted to replicate my mom's groundbreaking experiment because he wanted to know if his butterflies could remember him.

Speaker 24 I came home and said to dad, look what I got in the mail. You know, this was the most fun letter I ever got.

Speaker 43 Yeah, I was there when the package came.

Speaker 13 That's my dad, Josh.

Speaker 43 Full-size sheets of paper with his handwritten letters, photos of himself.

Speaker 24 A very cute kid with glasses.

Speaker 43 And his butterflies.

Speaker 24 He's looking through a magnifying glass. And then there are two pages of data figures.

Speaker 43 I mean, she was laughing and

Speaker 43 reading with her mouth wide open.

Speaker 43 I thought it was wonderful.

Speaker 30 Joe had no idea what a perfect correspondent he'd found because the only audience my mom respects more than her entomological peers is small children.

Speaker 24 They are curious about stuff and they haven't figured out that it's boring to look at plants or bugs.

Speaker 16 She's diagnosed elementary school as the last chance to intervene before the veil of indifference descends.

Speaker 24 Seventh grade, eighth grade, is it going to be on the test? Do we have to know that? Second grade, third grade, bingo.

Speaker 12 And something horrible must happen in fifth and sixth grade.

Speaker 24 Puberty. Everybody becomes more interested in each other than the bugs, which is good because it helps our species persist.

Speaker 49 Outside her academic work, my mom has spent decades weaseling her way into children's classrooms to make the case for the humble arthropod.

Speaker 19 She brought poop-shooting caterpillars to my kindergarten.

Speaker 51 She organized cricket races at my sister's 10th birthday party.

Speaker 50 Every year, she and her colleagues crawl around the woods collecting caterpillars to show off at schools around the city.

Speaker 34 They call it the Caterpillar Road Show.

Speaker 36 So with Joe Nagai, my mom wasted zero time in writing him back.

Speaker 24 Dear Joe Nagai, I was so excited to get your packet in the mail. It was such a fun and interesting letter.

Speaker 24 I loved reading about your experiments and your discoveries, and I'm so happy to have a new friend in Japan who loves caterpillars and butterflies as much as I do.

Speaker 23 To be clear, she didn't actually think Joe could recreate her experiment.

Speaker 41 The way she and her grad student, Doug Blackiston, had done their study was by training caterpillars to hate a specific smell and then testing whether, once those caterpillars became moths, they still hated the smell.

Speaker 55 They did the training with this elaborate lab setup where they'd release the chemical smell, then give the caterpillar an electric shock so it would associate the smell with pain.

Speaker 18 Not totally a kid-level project.

Speaker 41 So in that first letter, my mom suggested Joe try something simpler, like teaching butterflies to learn colors.

Speaker 24 I could help you test this with your swallowtails, which might be a great research project for third grade.

Speaker 14 So here you're giving him the old, why don't you try colors before memory through metamorphosis?

Speaker 24 Exactly.

Speaker 24 I could write so much more, but want to send this off now so you will know how happy I am to have heard from you. Your friend, Martha Weiss.

Speaker 24 And then I included some pictures, a zebra swallowtail butterfly and an eastern tiger swallowtail, just to show that we both are swallowtail aficionados.

Speaker 55 A few weeks later, she got a response.

Speaker 24 Dear Professor Martha Weiss, thank you very much for your reply. I was so happy and surprised to have a reply from you.
I couldn't believe it first. Thank you very much.

Speaker 51 Joe politely expressed interest in her color learning experiment and thanked her for the butterfly photos.

Speaker 44 But he stuck to his guns on the memory stuff.

Speaker 24 I really want to prove it's possible that my butterflies can remember what they learned as a caterpillar. I don't want to give up now.
I really need your help.

Speaker 44 And Joe wasn't waiting for her approval.

Speaker 27 He told her he had already started adapting her protocols for his own at-home lab.

Speaker 24 But I don't have any devices in my house. I can't make electronic shocks.

Speaker 44 This wasn't what my mom had expected.

Speaker 36 The letter was so serious.

Speaker 39 Joe was so serious.

Speaker 33 So that summer, they became regular pen pals.

Speaker 44 In his emails, Joe kept her up to date on his work.

Speaker 48 And he was confident.

Speaker 19 Like, he wasn't afraid to question my mom's research methods.

Speaker 52 Why, for example, she'd chosen the chemical she'd use to train the caterpillars.

Speaker 24 I have no idea why you picked ethyl acetate for the experiment of Manduca sexta.

Speaker 24 I felt a little bit defensive about my use of ethyl acetate.

Speaker 12 Still, in every email, Joe thanked my mom for her time and attention.

Speaker 24 I know you're so busy, but I'm so happy when you write me back.

Speaker 55 In the fall, he wrote to say his study was done.

Speaker 38 It was 33 pages in Japanese, but he'd helpfully translated the basics.

Speaker 52 He said he'd done essentially the same study as my mom. Trained caterpillars to hate a smell, tested whether they'd avoid it as butterflies.

Speaker 36 He'd used a little muscle therapy device device to give the shocks and lavender oil instead of that toxic chemical for the smell.

Speaker 40 So the caterpillars learned to hate the lavender.

Speaker 41 And according to Joe, when those caterpillars became butterflies, 80% of them still avoided the smell.

Speaker 12 If what Joe said was true, not only had he replicated my mom and Doug's groundbreaking experiment at home over summer vacation, but he found their same results in a whole new species.

Speaker 9 They'd studied moths, but he was the first person in the world to show that memories could persist through metamorphosis in butterflies. And what did you think when you got that email?

Speaker 24 I was flabbergasted and delighted. And in this letter, I thought, holy cow, he's a real scientist, and he's figuring out new stuff.

Speaker 52 As the months went on, my whole family became obsessed with Joe.

Speaker 19 We talked about him all the time.

Speaker 43 You just don't expect to see or hear that level of sophistication out of anybody without a PhD.

Speaker 19 My dad, again.

Speaker 43 Definitely not someone in elementary school.

Speaker 24 We go to see friends or family or something.

Speaker 57 We're like, you got to know.

Speaker 61 Here's the latest updates on Joan Aguye.

Speaker 36 My sister Isabel.

Speaker 57 What's the new tea? What's he up to these days?

Speaker 11 What has he discovered? What kind of...

Speaker 57 you know, like advances has he made.

Speaker 62 Every time I talk to your parents, I get the parents' update and I get the Jonah Guy update.

Speaker 12 My boyfriend, Harrison.

Speaker 26 And there's always something exciting.

Speaker 23 For example, in September 2022, Joe presented his research to scientists at Shinshu University, then at Tsukuba University and Saga University.

Speaker 55 He also graduated from second grade.

Speaker 12 And then in the spring of 2023, Joe wrote to my mom rather casually that he had a whole new research question.

Speaker 49 He wrote, by the way, I'd like to study if memories can be inherited to the next generation this summer.

Speaker 23 Joe wanted to study if caterpillar children could remember things that had happened to their parents.

Speaker 33 I know that most people generally think memories can't be inherited from ancestors, Joe wrote.

Speaker 40 But he'd found a recent study that suggested it might be possible in nematodes, these tiny freaky worms.

Speaker 37 If they could do it, he thought, why not swallowtails?

Speaker 24 It had never occurred to me to even ask that question.

Speaker 55 Joe's first study was advanced, but this was a whole other realm.

Speaker 42 Epigenetics.

Speaker 49 The ways environment and experience can change how our genes are expressed, even across generations.

Speaker 12 It's a field of biology my mom calls the new frontier, and it's not exactly her area of expertise.

Speaker 24 I don't live on the frontier. I live in the heartland.
And so when he said I read the nematode paper, I had to go scramble and find the nematode paper.

Speaker 24 I was too embarrassed to ask Joe which nematode paper because I didn't want him to be too much ahead of me on the up-to-the-minute research.

Speaker 48 The inheritance of memory has only been studied in a few species, those worms, some mice.

Speaker 44 My mom wrote back to Joe, this is a controversial topic, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

Speaker 18 We can learn more by doing more studies.

Speaker 15 Joe forged ahead.

Speaker 52 He did his experiment again, but tested a second generation generation too to see if they avoided the same smell he'd trained their parents to hate.

Speaker 18 And a few months later, he wrote to my mom that the results were clear.

Speaker 12 His butterflies had passed their memories on to their children.

Speaker 19 When I was growing up, bugs were a central feature of our household.

Speaker 33 They were just always around.

Speaker 48 My mom raised silkworms in a box in the dining room, and she kept cicada exoskeletons in a jar in the kitchen, which my teenage friends found horrifying.

Speaker 2 She was waging the pro-bug campaign on the home front.

Speaker 44 And for a while, it worked.

Speaker 24 You don't squish bugs and you don't scream when you find a spider in the bathtub. I consider that a victory.

Speaker 64 But I guess at some point, that dreaded veil of indifference fell over me too.

Speaker 44 Or maybe it was just puberty.

Speaker 52 By the time I was in high school, I was less interested in bugs and more interested in people.

Speaker 21 These days, my extracurricular reading is about stuff like historical memory, how experience moves down through time.

Speaker 13 That's what I'm always trying to report on, although my editors tend to steer me towards the news.

Speaker 16 But now, my mom's tiny genius pen pal was saying he had proof that in this one species, what happens in a parent's early life can show up in their kid.

Speaker 12 The inheritance of traumatic memory.

Speaker 28 The caterpillar body keeps the score.

Speaker 19 My mom is always warning me against anthropomorphism.

Speaker 13 But in a way, it seemed like Joe was asking the same question I often am.

Speaker 65 How we get to be who we are.

Speaker 24 How to say butterfly in Japanese.

Speaker 63 Joe.

Speaker 12 Oh, I know that.

Speaker 24 I knew that because Madam Butterfly.

Speaker 12 A while back, my mom got this note from Joe.

Speaker 24 He said, Dear Professor Martha Weiss, hello, how are you?

Speaker 9 Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 24 Is it getting colder in your town, too? How do your caterpillars and butterflies spend during cold winter? Well, do you know the International Congress of Entomology, ICE 2024?

Speaker 24 The website is as follows with the URL. It will be held in Kyoto, Japan in 2024.
Are you going to come and attend it?

Speaker 24 If you come there, I'd like to see you and can show you around Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, my town.

Speaker 64 My mom did, in fact, know the International Congress of Entomology.

Speaker 52 It's one of the biggest conferences in the field.

Speaker 38 It was happening in August.

Speaker 13 She hadn't been planning on going this year, but a personal invite from Joe changed the equation.

Speaker 30 And once she decided to go, there was no question.

Speaker 38 Actually, all of us would come to Japan.

Speaker 16 My entire family, plus my boyfriend, bought plane tickets.

Speaker 23 In the months leading up to the trip, my mom helped Joe with his application to present a poster at the conference.

Speaker 55 She thought he had basically a dissertation's worth of research.

Speaker 19 She, on the other hand, was bringing a plan for an experiment she hadn't actually started yet.

Speaker 23 Maybe he can lend you one paper.

Speaker 24 Yeah, just come on.

Speaker 27 I loved the story of Joe, this child prodigy showing up my mom, esteemed entomologist.

Speaker 17 And I was telling everyone I knew about his big finding.

Speaker 50 But now we were about to actually meet him.

Speaker 60 And part of me had started to worry.

Speaker 17 Over two full years of correspondence, my mom and Joe had never actually spoken.

Speaker 17 In fact, she wasn't even writing him directly.

Speaker 14 You're emailing his mom's email.

Speaker 24 Because he doesn't have his own email. So his mother is the invisible portal through whom we communicate.
So his mother is named Sari.

Speaker 24 And so I get an email from Sari and it says, hi, this is Joe. And then I write to Sari and say, hi, Joe.
Although, two times ago I wrote and said, hi, Sari.

Speaker 24 This is Martha Weiss. Joe invited us to come visit him in Kobe.

Speaker 24 And so I just wanted to check in with you. And have I heard from Sari? No.

Speaker 24 But I did hear from Joe what hotel he and his mother, Sari, will be staying in in Kyoto. So I made reservations at that hotel, too.

Speaker 26 Which

Speaker 25 I'm interested in this dynamic. Like, do you feel like you need to talk to his mom? Like, because

Speaker 38 you're sort of emailing a child all the time?

Speaker 24 Well, I feel the science is between me and Joe. but when he says, come visit me at my home in Kobe, that then I need to check with his mom.

Speaker 64 Have you ever thought about

Speaker 12 zooming him?

Speaker 24 I guess I did initially,

Speaker 24 but

Speaker 24 I don't know. There's something sort of nice about writing.

Speaker 25 It's sort of Jane Austen of you guys.

Speaker 24 It's a little more Jane Austen, exactly. I think he feels that way too.

Speaker 2 I mean, do you like the mystery?

Speaker 25 Like, do you like that we just like, I mean, Jonah Guy is like a, he's like a national hero in our house.

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 24 yes, I do like the mystery. I think, I think that's part of it.
I'm and and to be honest, I'm a tiny bit nervous about meeting him in person.

Speaker 26 But what are you nervous about?

Speaker 9 I don't know.

Speaker 24 I mean, I guess, I guess our correspondence is

Speaker 24 it's all about science and

Speaker 24 butterflies and there's nothing else in it. Like, what if he's like a mean kid who has temper tantrums and

Speaker 24 kicks and screams and bites his baby sister?

Speaker 57 I can't imagine that Joe is a biter.

Speaker 14 But are you at all worried that he's a catfish?

Speaker 24 Well, let me just say that I'm only recently learned the term catfish.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 24 some people have said to me, is this kid for real? Do you think that this is an elaborate ploy?

Speaker 25 You're You're sort of a trusting correspondent.

Speaker 24 I'm a trusting correspondent.

Speaker 4 Hey, this is Molly again. We are going to take a quick break, but when we get back, we will find out kid or catfish when Martha and her entire family go to Japan.

Speaker 4 That's coming up after break.

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Speaker 4 Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster, and today we are playing a super special story for you called Caterpillar Road Show.

Speaker 4 It is about a bug scientist and a young boy in Japan who strike up a long-distance email correspondence because they're both really excited about the scientific work of caterpillars, butterflies, moths.

Speaker 4 Up until this point, though, they have never met in person, but that is about to change. Let's listen in.

Speaker 66 Welcome to Tokyo. The local time is 2.55 in the afternoon on August 15th.
Please stay comfortably seated until the sea ball sign has been turned off.

Speaker 40 When we got to Japan, Joe still had a few days of school before the conference, so we had to find ways to distract ourselves.

Speaker 2 Which wasn't hard.

Speaker 52 We were surrounded by amazing and surprising things.

Speaker 19 Like the public toilets that automatically make the sound of a waterfall and birds chirping to cover up any embarrassing pee noise.

Speaker 49 And the beautiful glowing vending machines on every other block.

Speaker 34 At any time of day or night, you can pop in a couple hundred yen and get a whiskey high ball or a sippy cup of apple juice or a perfect sports drink called Pukari Sweat.

Speaker 50 But the most amazing and surprising thing, bugs were everywhere in the trees outside temples, restaurants, but also on t-shirts, book covers, street signs.

Speaker 18 On the subway, we saw a poster for an insect show at the Tokyo Museum of Nature and Science.

Speaker 35 Inside, the hall was packed with hundreds of people, more excited than I've ever seen anybody in a museum, honestly.

Speaker 21 And they weren't just stopping at the iridescent butterfly wings.

Speaker 55 They were reading about the way a spider disguises itself to mimic an ant.

Speaker 63 Structural color, parasitic wasps.

Speaker 31 Yeah, you see that a lot in Japan. You know, you go to just a public park in the center of Tokyo and you'll see a parent with a butterfly net with their child carrying a little insect insect cage.

Speaker 34 This is Akito Kawahara.

Speaker 33 He's a big deal in bug science, the director of a center for butterfly and moth biodiversity in Florida.

Speaker 45 And he grew up in Tokyo.

Speaker 55 I called him to ask basically, is this a thing?

Speaker 36 Or was I just on high alert for bug stuff?

Speaker 34 Like the bug-shaped toys we saw all over the city.

Speaker 44 So gotcha, gotcha.

Speaker 31 So what it is, is essentially it's a gumball machine where you put some money, a dollar or two, into a machine.

Speaker 9 One,

Speaker 9 two,

Speaker 9 three.

Speaker 31 And a ball comes out.

Speaker 9 Ready? Yep.

Speaker 31 And inside the ball there's a toy.

Speaker 9 A big boy.

Speaker 31 And there's a whole bunch of insect ones. And some of these insect ones are extremely realistic.

Speaker 33 You know, look how much you can make it move around.

Speaker 9 That's a deal for an articulating thing. That's a deal.

Speaker 33 And then look, we should get another one so it can fight.

Speaker 15 Japanese pop culture isn't just full of bugs.

Speaker 13 It's full of youth insect enthusiasts.

Speaker 35 Akido told me about a popular video game where you play a kid helping a scientist collect and identify escaped bugs.

Speaker 60 And the guy who created Pokemon, he started out wanting to be an entomologist.

Speaker 50 The game came straight out of the years he spent scouring the wilderness for bugs.

Speaker 13 People here have been insect fans for a long time. More than a thousand years ago, Japanese nobles kept crickets in cages to listen to their chirps.

Speaker 14 In the late 1800s, kids' magazines aggressively advertised bug collecting to patriotic and masculine boys.

Speaker 40 By the 1930s, insect hobbyist societies had hundreds of members who'd go on collecting trips, tromping around the forest and posing with their butterfly nets like big game hunters.

Speaker 16 Beetles in particular became kind of a status symbol, an exotic pet.

Speaker 31 It got to the point where you know people were trying to grow the biggest beetles and uh and then they would sell them and and in one case uh one of the beetles sold for an incredible $90,000.

Speaker 15 One of Akido's closest friends actually raises beetles.

Speaker 31 Every time I go back to Japan, he's driving a different colored Ferrari. And oftentimes, I joke that I might have made the wrong decision in my career to become a scientist.

Speaker 31 And maybe I should have just reared beetles and had a life that was different from what I'm doing now.

Speaker 47 Papillio Zoothus, is that right?

Speaker 24 That's his butterfly.

Speaker 60 At the museum, I thought about Joe.

Speaker 30 From the distance of my mom's kitchen in DC, his passion had seemed totally unique and mysterious.

Speaker 12 Here, it suddenly seemed a lot less random.

Speaker 16 We found an exhibit about swallowtails, and my mom texted Sari, Joe's mom, a picture.

Speaker 27 Sari sent back an emoji of a rabbit with exploding heart eyes.

Speaker 58 They'd finally made direct adult-to-adult contact.

Speaker 33 She and Joe and his brother were coming to meet us in two days.

Speaker 32 We're on the train, finally on our way to meet Joe.

Speaker 9 I can't go through it.

Speaker 9 I'm getting off at the next station and going back in the other direction.

Speaker 44 Too late.

Speaker 9 We pull into the station, get off the train, and there they are, just on the other side of the turnstile.

Speaker 18 I'm trying to be present for the meeting and also fumbling to get my recorder rolling.

Speaker 15 Sari, in her late 30s, has a ponytail, a white blouse, a parasol for the sun.

Speaker 27 And then there are the two boys.

Speaker 44 Hayato, or Harry, age 13, mid-8th grade growth spurt in a huge t-shirt and baseball cap.

Speaker 49 And next to him, the man himself.

Speaker 9 Joe? Yeah, I'm Joe. I'm Josh.

Speaker 37 He's a pretty small guy.

Speaker 20 with very discreet bangs like the tines of a feathery fork.

Speaker 12 Big Harry Potter glasses and a round little face that makes him look younger than 10.

Speaker 33 He's wearing a traditional Jinbei, a matching wraparound shirt and shorts, and carrying a backpack about half his height.

Speaker 24 And you have your butterfly net.

Speaker 12 He and my mom are both smiling big, but a little awkward with each other.

Speaker 33 Like meeting somebody for a first date after you've bared your soul to them over text.

Speaker 23 For the next few hours, Joe takes the reins.

Speaker 65 As we walk around the city, he makes the most of opportunities for viewing wildlife.

Speaker 11 For example, a pigeon we pass.

Speaker 67 We can't touch it, but

Speaker 67 it is very cute.

Speaker 17 We visit Himeji Castle, Joe's favorite castle, and he points out big gulping fish swimming in the moat.

Speaker 65 It is beautiful.

Speaker 24 Look at their blue, flashing blue.

Speaker 67 Yeah, beautiful, wonderful.

Speaker 18 And he helps us work on our manners.

Speaker 67 If you eat food, first you say itaraki masu.

Speaker 24 Itaraki masu? Itaraki masu.

Speaker 24 What does that mean?

Speaker 67 We eat birds and

Speaker 9 fish and a lot of creatures.

Speaker 67 So we have to thank.

Speaker 24 To say thank you.

Speaker 9 Thank you.

Speaker 68 To say thank you to the creatures.

Speaker 26 Creatures, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 55 Joe seems to be amazed by basically every living thing we see around us.

Speaker 20 He's sweet and solicitous, and also a totally normal kid.

Speaker 50 Impatient in the heat, hungry for junk food, constantly proposing a game.

Speaker 24 What do you do?

Speaker 56 Like, who has the stronger pine needle?

Speaker 26 So Joe's is stronger?

Speaker 9 Joe's is stronger.

Speaker 24 Are you stronger than me?

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 40 At lunch, Sari tells us that Joe has been invited to present his research to the Crown Prince of Japan in a private meeting at the beginning of the conference.

Speaker 16 He seems unfazed.

Speaker 36 He says he's just a little nervous.

Speaker 2 But he's starstruck by my mom.

Speaker 19 When we finish eating, she presents Joe with a hand lens, a little magnifying glass attached to a ribbon, just like the one she wears around her neck.

Speaker 34 He makes very direct eye contact and says, I love this so much. I want it.

Speaker 53 Outside the restaurant, a woman is performing a Japanese version of Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid.

Speaker 13 And somehow it feels exactly right.

Speaker 30 It's a million degrees out and we're soaked in sweat, all awkwardness gone, everyone is giddy.

Speaker 45 It feels like a fairy tale.

Speaker 33 Castles and princes, a sage advisor, a young apprentice.

Speaker 55 We take a bus to the edge of the city and ride a glass gondola high up into the mountains.

Speaker 2 At the top, we climb out into a cool, sweet-smelling forest

Speaker 48 and a symphony of bugs.

Speaker 67 What's that? It is uh

Speaker 67 beetle.

Speaker 67 Masha is a beetle. Kind of beetle? Beetle, yeah.

Speaker 69 Do you need a case?

Speaker 9 Um

Speaker 57 I have a case. I like it.

Speaker 24 Yes, please. Yes, please.

Speaker 24 I made a mistake to not bring my cases with me.

Speaker 2 You have Joe came prepared.

Speaker 67 I will give you.

Speaker 24 Thank you very much.

Speaker 50 At the top of the mountain, Joe sees something.

Speaker 18 He leaps forward, his net zigzagging back and forth like a banner.

Speaker 12 And then...

Speaker 66 I get it. You got it?

Speaker 66 No.

Speaker 24 I take it.

Speaker 24 Oh, that's the one you showed me. Yeah.

Speaker 24 That is beautiful. Joe showed me a picture of this and he said we might find these.

Speaker 26 It's an East Asian tiger beetle.

Speaker 55 Maybe the most flamboyant bug I've ever seen, with a bright green head, long antennae, blue and rust-colored splotches all over its back.

Speaker 24 Oh my goodness, look at that color. Look at that color.

Speaker 69 Yes, those shiny and metal color.

Speaker 23 Sari convinces Joe to let it go.

Speaker 24 Oh well, release it.

Speaker 24 Can I hold it for one second?

Speaker 24 The wings are very...

Speaker 44 Goodbye. Good luck.

Speaker 24 He's very powerful. Yeah, he's a strong flyer.

Speaker 23 The moon is rising over the city.

Speaker 19 We catch the last gondola down in the pink light.

Speaker 19 After dinner, my family boards the train back to our hotel.

Speaker 49 Hayato and Joe wave from the platform for a full minute, and once our train starts moving, Joe runs after it.

Speaker 24 Outside the window of the train, we just saw him speeding along and keeping up with us until our bullet train pulled away and we left him behind. And I just felt like it was the best day ever.

Speaker 19 When I was six, a brood of periodical cicadas emerged in DC.

Speaker 33 Billions of bugs that spend their whole lives underground and tunnel up to the surface just once after 17 years.

Speaker 50 For a few chaotic weeks, the city is completely overtaken by their wine.

Speaker 48 As you might imagine, while most people saw the cicadas as a menace, my mom was basically hysterical with excitement.

Speaker 18 Late at night, the bugs would climb up trees around the neighborhood to molt.

Speaker 36 And one night she let me and Isabel stay up until midnight to watch.

Speaker 44 We walked down the block with flashlights, stopping at a tree.

Speaker 11 Just Just above my head, these bright white cicadas with ruby red eyes were stretching backwards out of their old shells.

Speaker 56 So new to the world, they were still damp.

Speaker 64 It felt like I'd been let in on a huge secret, catching them in this private moment in the dark.

Speaker 12 I was reminded of that night walking into the conference center.

Speaker 36 Here I was an interloper again, surrounded by thousands of entomologists, the international denizens of my mom's mom's world.

Speaker 47 They weren't the most visually intimidating group, lots of cargo shorts and t-shirts with bug puns on them. But this was their turf.

Speaker 19 They were keepers of bug knowledge not yet released to the larger world.

Speaker 35 I was unprepared for the scene in the poster hall.

Speaker 46 Alongside the adults, there was an army of young scientists.

Speaker 67 Hello, we are from Takatsuki Senior High School. And today we would like to talk about turn automation

Speaker 11 or peel bags.

Speaker 63 These were Joe's peers.

Speaker 52 At 10 years old, he wasn't even the youngest presenter.

Speaker 70 I'm Takeru Inagake.

Speaker 70 I'm in the fourth grade of elementary school. I've been collecting bottom right since I was six years old.

Speaker 11 Takeru was approximately three feet tall.

Speaker 70 Thank you for listening to my presentation.

Speaker 71 My research is about leaf-rolling weevils. So do you you know leaf-rolling weevils?

Speaker 9 No, I don't know them.

Speaker 72 Okay. So let me explain.
Thank you.

Speaker 56 Shuse is 14.

Speaker 54 It's a very impressive presentation.

Speaker 47 Yes, thank you very much.

Speaker 69 Are there many students your age who are doing entomological research?

Speaker 71 Yes, many kids, students are doing some kind of research about the insects.

Speaker 72 But his one is really amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 63 He was looking over at Joe, whose poster was right next door.

Speaker 69 Has he didn't explain it to you already?

Speaker 72 Actually, he's my friend.

Speaker 71 Our house is really close that we can meet each other often.

Speaker 54 And do you guys discuss your research together?

Speaker 72 Yes, yes. He's four years younger than now.

Speaker 71 But

Speaker 71 the things that he is doing is more level high.

Speaker 58 Joe was in full networking mode, suit and tie, handing out his business card.

Speaker 9 I'm Joe Navay.

Speaker 9 Joe, nice to meet you.

Speaker 42 So, can we take a picture with you

Speaker 42 on the poster?

Speaker 42 You have a bright future in front of you. No doubt about that.

Speaker 21 Hanging around Joe's poster, I met Masato Ono, the conference chair.

Speaker 42 President of organizing.

Speaker 9 Oh, wow, okay.

Speaker 9 Very nice to meet you.

Speaker 42 And Akido Kawahara, the big-name butterfly expert from earlier.

Speaker 73 He's just incredible. Like, you know, everything that he's done is just like incredible.

Speaker 31 Like, I want him in my lab.

Speaker 73 I'm secretly like, oh, maybe he wants to do some research in America.

Speaker 27 We stood there watching Joe together.

Speaker 67 In the parent generation, I gave the electric shock and a lavend odor. I waited until they became butterflies.

Speaker 67 And they avoided lavan odor so

Speaker 67 I know they can remember what they nurse cattle better.

Speaker 67 In the child generation, they also avoided lavan odor so that memories can persist to the next generation.

Speaker 33 And the parent all day, Joe and his poster were swamped.

Speaker 52 I could barely see him behind his crowd of admirers.

Speaker 64 That night, back at the comfort in Kyoto, Joe went straight to the hot tub for a triumphant soak.

Speaker 16 Conventional scientific wisdom says it's easier to remember a painful experience than a positive one.

Speaker 28 That's why, in their original experiment, my mom and Doug decided to teach their caterpillars to hate a smell, shocking them every time they smelled it.

Speaker 24 And it was clear from the caterpillar's behavior that they were receiving the shock. And I'll just leave it at that.

Speaker 26 Can you just say what that means?

Speaker 27 When my mom or her student pushed the button, the caterpillar would start to convulse and sometimes vomit.

Speaker 33 When Joe replicated the experiment, he'd taken a different approach.

Speaker 42 Instead of high voltage lab equipment, he'd used that little physical therapy device, a pad that emits small amounts of electricity to treat muscle pain.

Speaker 19 Joe already had one at home to help with pain in his own shoulders.

Speaker 9 I put the

Speaker 9 pad on my arms

Speaker 67 and inside of that pad there is a caterpillar.

Speaker 65 So the caterpillar would be sitting literally on Joe's arm, right between the pad and the softest part of his wrist.

Speaker 34 And so did you also feel the shock when they felt it?

Speaker 45 Yes. And was it painful to to you or what did it feel like to you?

Speaker 67 The first was very good for me, but

Speaker 67 if I did it every day,

Speaker 61 my

Speaker 67 arm will be red, pink or red, so I was very

Speaker 9 pain. I have pain.

Speaker 32 The machine has a bunch of different power levels, from 1 to 15.

Speaker 33 Joe had stopped at level 4.

Speaker 65 What and what was your thinking about why to use that level of shock and not more shock?

Speaker 67 Because they, in the level four,

Speaker 67 they pop out their osmateria.

Speaker 44 Osmateria.

Speaker 58 Little orange horns that pop out of the caterpillar's head when it gets scared.

Speaker 67 So I think it was enough for the caterpillar.

Speaker 42 And so you didn't want to hurt them more than you needed to?

Speaker 9 Yes. Yes, okay.

Speaker 23 In the breakfast room at the hotel, Joe got the machine out of his backpack for a demonstration.

Speaker 34 Sans Caterpillar.

Speaker 4 Where do you put it on my...

Speaker 40 Here.

Speaker 12 He strapped the little pad onto my forearm and pressed the button.

Speaker 9 Is it coming?

Speaker 42 I don't feel it yet. Is it?

Speaker 69 Oh, now I feel it a little bit. Number two.

Speaker 25 Okay, another one.

Speaker 61 Three.

Speaker 61 Oh, I feel it.

Speaker 37 It was a crazy feeling.

Speaker 33 A huge shudder that made my hand jump.

Speaker 24 You see Andy's all the materia coming?

Speaker 27 The science isn't clear on whether bugs feel pain.

Speaker 50 And as my mom has explained to me, there aren't a lot of rules around how you should treat them as a researcher.

Speaker 74 So if you're going to do something with a vertebrate, you have to put in a whole animal protocol. It has to be taken care of in an approved animal care and use facility.

Speaker 24 There's committees that monitor everything.

Speaker 74 Invertebrates, nobody

Speaker 74 cares one iota about.

Speaker 52 That means it's up to each individual scientist to set their own standards.

Speaker 59 Well, so what is your personal standard for your approach?

Speaker 74 Compassionate and treat them as if they feel pain and try to minimize any pain or suffering.

Speaker 24 While getting our science done.

Speaker 13 Joe seemed to have different priorities.

Speaker 24 He could have said, boy, I really want to make sure that they get it and crank it up to nine, but he didn't do that.

Speaker 25 You're thinking of the caterpillars almost as friends, maybe.

Speaker 9 I think it's a friend.

Speaker 67 You think it's a friend? But um, I give that an extra shock, so from the caterpillar, I am a bad friend.

Speaker 36 I talked to Joe for a long time about this.

Speaker 18 He told me he doesn't actually want to be an entomologist when he grows up, he wants to be a veterinarian.

Speaker 54 What kind of vet do you want to be?

Speaker 9 Um,

Speaker 67 I can fix um caterpillars and insects both.

Speaker 54 Do you know of, are there other insect veterinarians now?

Speaker 67 There are no insect vets now.

Speaker 52 So you might be the first insect vet?

Speaker 47 Yes.

Speaker 48 Way back in that first letter to my mom, Joe had told her he wanted to study insect memory because he thought his butterflies remembered him.

Speaker 18 Joe had a relationship with the bugs he worked with, and that relationship had shaped his questions, his methodology.

Speaker 12 So many scientists see anthropomorphizing as a cardinal sin.

Speaker 13 But for Joe, I realized, interspecies empathy was kind of a sleeper strength.

Speaker 54 All this work had come out of his willingness to wonder what a bug might know or feel.

Speaker 12 On the last morning of the conference, my mom said there was something we needed to do.

Speaker 21 All this time, she'd been an advisor to Joe. She'd checked his methods, helped him write his abstract, but she still hadn't seen his actual data, the raw numbers themselves.

Speaker 27 She didn't know for sure if we could conclude with statistical certainty that his findings were true.

Speaker 18 When I stopped to think about it, it seemed crazy that we'd made it through the whole trip without looking at this.

Speaker 32 But when I said that to my mom, she surprised me.

Speaker 24 Is it going to hold up if we do a statistical test? Are we going to see a significant result? In some ways, it doesn't really matter because

Speaker 24 a ton of other stuff has happened.

Speaker 41 And then I surprised myself because I sort of disagreed.

Speaker 64 I was still thinking about the science, this thing about memory and generations.

Speaker 13 I wanted it to be true.

Speaker 16 This is kind of what I'm trying to understand.

Speaker 36 Like, does this finding matter?

Speaker 24 Does this finding matter? I mean,

Speaker 24 does what I do matter? You know, at some level, yes. At some level, no.
Am I curing cancer? No. Am I stopping climate change? No.

Speaker 24 Am I helping myself and other people understand how organisms work and how they interact with their environment? Yes.

Speaker 24 And will that help us maybe understand our environments and our planets better and maybe help us have a little bit more empathy for some of the organisms that we live with? I hope so.

Speaker 24 But the other reason that it matters is because I care about Joe.

Speaker 16 Joe, who'd spent five of his 10 years of life on these studies and reached out to a scientist across the world to help him find answers.

Speaker 35 This was important to him. And he was important to us.

Speaker 18 And so we needed to know.

Speaker 13 Joe and Sari brought his research binder to my mom's hotel room.

Speaker 9 Lavender.

Speaker 24 How many butterflies?

Speaker 49 Together we went through it page by page.

Speaker 67 Nine of them went to the sugar water.

Speaker 36 My mom asked about his controls

Speaker 52 and they double-checked his counts.

Speaker 24 Three, four, five, six, seven.

Speaker 22 And then she said they needed to do a test.

Speaker 24 It's a test of probability.

Speaker 24 And it's how likely something is to happen by chance.

Speaker 24 If we take our 10 yen coin and we flip it in the air, how many times are we going to get the castle and how many times are we going to get the ten?

Speaker 63 Joe looked at her for a second, a little confused.

Speaker 24 Why don't you do it for me ten times and tell me each time what you get?

Speaker 24 Just quickly. Okay, so you got a ten.

Speaker 16 Joe and my mom sat at the table.

Speaker 12 Ten.

Speaker 19 Sari and I on twin beds watching them flip the coin.

Speaker 50 In my head, I was cataloging all the little happenings that got us here.

Speaker 57 Okay.

Speaker 19 That Joe found my mom's research and could understand it.

Speaker 12 That he had a mom who could and would help him do his own research.

Speaker 63 10.

Speaker 45 That my mom would be so willing to get on board

Speaker 40 and to rope the rest of us in too.

Speaker 9 10.

Speaker 3 Carrice.

Speaker 24 Stop.

Speaker 58 Five tens, five palaces.

Speaker 24 And that is pretty much what you would expect because they're the same. And half the time it's going to be one and half the time it's going to be the other, right?

Speaker 24 What if you did that and you got a 10 10 times in a row? What would you think?

Speaker 24 10 is very heavy. That there's something a little weird going on with that coin, right?

Speaker 24 What we do first when we're doing this test is we figure out what our expectation is, okay?

Speaker 24 And so, for our first generation,

Speaker 24 we had 44

Speaker 24 caterpillars made choices, right? Yes.

Speaker 24 We would expect, if they hadn't learned anything,

Speaker 24 we would expect

Speaker 24 that 22 of them,

Speaker 24 half of them, would go to sugar, Pokhari sweat,

Speaker 24 and that 22 of them would go to lavender, right?

Speaker 38 And having just said how valuable the details of the science turn out to be, You don't really need to know how to do statistical analysis to understand what comes next.

Speaker 24 So we're just going to go times two

Speaker 57 equals

Speaker 24 6.07.

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 24 Is 6.07

Speaker 24 smaller

Speaker 24 or larger than 3.841?

Speaker 57 Larger.

Speaker 24 Larger. So that means that this result is very unlikely to happen just by chance.

Speaker 24 This means that

Speaker 24 something happened to those butterflies to make them make that choice.

Speaker 24 That is what we call a statistically significant result.

Speaker 18 In the months since we got back from Japan, my mom and Joe have been drafting a paper on his findings together.

Speaker 45 They're going to send it to the Journal of the Lepidopteris Society to tell them we think this is really true.

Speaker 52 Butterflies can remember something they learned as caterpillars, and their kids can inherit that memory too.

Speaker 30 In DC, my mom's been reading up on epigenetics.

Speaker 36 She told me she's been thinking about our conversations, remembering things from her own childhood.

Speaker 40 and from when she was pregnant with me.

Speaker 38 She spent a long time in the hospital in the months before I was born, and a student had brought her a bunch of caterpillars to keep her company next to her bed in a little plastic shoebox.

Speaker 28 And as her stomach ballooned with Fetus Me inside, the caterpillars crawled out of their box and into different corners of the room to pupate.

Speaker 24 As we know, lots of things are going on inside that chrysalis.

Speaker 24 So they were changing in the same way that you were changing. And then they emerged as butterflies, and you emerged as a little red frog with a weak chin.

Speaker 43 Oh my god.

Speaker 12 Joe, meanwhile, is finessing his study on butterfly grandchild memory.

Speaker 19 He's about to finish fifth grade.

Speaker 13 A Japanese TV station recently aired an episode about him.

Speaker 30 When he opens the door to the camera crew, MTV Cribs style, he's wearing the hand lens my mom gave him on a ribbon around his neck.

Speaker 4 That was an excerpt of Caterpillar Roadshow produced and reported by Annie Rosenthal.

Speaker 4 That story first premiered on the audio magazine Signal Hill.

Speaker 4 You can listen to the entire piece along with a bunch of other really great stories from Signal Hill, and you can get that wherever you get podcasts. That's Signal Hill.

Speaker 4 So this story had sound design and editing by Liza Yeager and Jackson Roach who I'm proud to say are former Radio Lab interns. We miss you guys.

Speaker 4 They had help on the piece from Leo Wong and Omar Ettman. It was fact-checked by Alan Dean.

Speaker 4 Special thanks to Carlos Morales, John Lill, Marfa Public Radio, the Nagai family, the Rosenthal family, and Emma Garshagen for tipping us off to the story in the first place. And that's it.

Speaker 4 We will be back soon with a brand new full episode of Radio Lab. I am Molly Webster.

Speaker 16 I got to listen this time.

Speaker 15 It was so fun listening with you.

Speaker 75 Hi, I'm Dylan. I'm calling from the St.
Lawrence River in upstate New York, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abenrod and is edited by Thorn Wheeler.

Speaker 75 Lula Miller and Lassip Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our Director of Sound Design.
Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 75 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu, Niana Sambanda, Matt Kielce, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Zara Sandback, Anissa Vitza, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 75 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 10 Hi, I'm Rafael Collin from Fajotila, Brazil.

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