It's Friday.

You know how caterpillars become butterflies?

Well, that is a lot Any given caterpillar, You spot hunk in its way down the sidewalk.

There's a 90% chance that that fresh little wiggler is incapable of becoming a butterfly, and instead it will become a Ma and John loss.

No, my God, they're so good.

What precisely is a moth?

Us?

Well, here's where it gets a little bit messed up because butterflies are a thing.

They're like all they have a single common ancestor.

Moths are just anything that's not a butterfly.

Any scale, wing thing that isn't a butterfly moth.

Is it more closely related to some butterflies than it is to some office?

Doesn't matter, ma.

And talk about a branding problem, right?

Butterflies, This beautiful word.

It's spoon arises to flutter by, and then moth sounds like the noise you make when a moth flies into your mouth.

But moths, moss, moss, moths, moths were stuck with the name Let's just look at these beautiful creatures, and what I want to talk to you about today is mostly the regal moth.

Why, because of its caterpillar, the hickory horned devil, which looks like this.

You will never forget this Caterpillar or probably its name, because it has got brand power brand too strong now.

There are other horned devils out there.

This is the largest of the Horned Devils.

It's from South America, but the hickory with its blue body and it's red horns.

Why does it look this way?

Well, because it's basically Ah, hot dog with legs.

It's very good eating.

It looks fierce, but it's not.

It can't sting it can't bite.

It's not venomous.

It's not poisonous, but it's too big to hide from raccoons and possums.

So it's got to make those fuzzy folk worry about their noses and toes ease before grabbing on and taking a bite.

But lots of caterpillars don't become gigantic food bags.

In fact, the Hickory horn devil is the largest caterpillar in the U.

S.

So why is it so big?

Because the hickory horn devil has to consume massive amounts of food because attorney and moths, which is this is one of its like over 1000 species of these guys do not have mouths once they become moth.

Once this attorney and Caterpillar pew pates, it will never eat again.

And so these caterpillars eat 2 to 3 times their own body weight in leaves every day, growing in size over 1000 times in the course of a month.

They don't even digest the cellulose of these plants.

Instead, they basically juice the leaves in their guts.

This time lapse footage, by the way, is from John the Butterfly Farmer, and his channel is amazing.

There will be a link in the end screen and description.

The males emerge from the chrysalis.

They fly, sometimes for miles, trying to sniff out a female with their extremely sensitive, feathery antenna.

Their job is to locate the female because the females job is to use all of its energy, creating hundreds of very large eggs.

The female regal moth does not fly until it mates, and if it does not mate, it never flies.

It just dies waiting, have to mate and lay their eggs within the seven days they have to live in their adult forms.

The strategy of regal moss and other Saturn I ity is that the ma phase exists on Lee for meeting and breeding, and to pull that off, the caterpillar needs to be successful in storing fats and proteins before it.

Pew pates.

And so it has to get big and full of nutrients, which makes it a perfect snack.

So it has to look ridiculously fierce.

Pretty much anything would see this juicy boy and think that is not worth the risk, which is also how most people feel about them, even though they are completely harmless.

Still be nice, because they are a marvel, even if they are a little terrifying.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

The Bazaar Bees PIN Club was so successful that this month this is the only time will do this.

We're actually gonna give you two pins both the caterpillar and the moth.

Thank you to everybody who signed up and thanks both to the butterfly Farmer and to Bart for letting me use their moth footage.

Both channels are linked here.