The little-known world of caterpillars
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> Manduca sexta caterpillars received an electrical shock associatively paired with a specific odor in order to create a conditioned odor aversion, and were assayed for learning in a Y choice apparatus as larvae and again as adult moths. We show that larvae learned to avoid the training odor, and that this aversion was still present in the adults.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
This is why certain memories can be retained and certain ones can't.
EDIT:
"Textbooks will commonly talk about the insect dissolving into a kind of “soup”, but that’s not entirely accurate. Some organs stay intact. Others, like muscles, break down into clumps of cells that can be re-used, like a Lego sculpture decomposing into bricks. And some cells create imaginal discs—structures that produce adult body parts. There’s a pair for the antennae, a pair for the eyes, one for each leg and wing, and so on. So if the pupa contains a soup, it’s an organised broth full of chunky bits."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/3-d-scans...
Except for (at least) the guy that discovered and presumably named it - André Blanchard?
The article is full of this kind of stuff.
Blanchard had a holotype of the moth only. [1]
[1] https://archive.org/details/cbarchive_49606_anewspeciesinthe...
Please note that this is a criticism of the journalism, which I think is crap, not the science.
> Based on a series of taxonomic calculations, Wagner was convinced that the caterpillar was the juvenile form of an exceptionally rare moth known as Ursia furtiva.
They can tell you that the form you're looking at is related to certain other known forms. That's it.
Wagner is a career lepidopterist and an authority on caterpillars. He will be intimately familiar with caterpillars in the family Notodontidae (which contains the genus Ursia) and know their characteristic morphology and diversity. There are only two species known in the genus Ursia. The other one has a more southwesterly range and is not known to occur in Texas. Also, the caterpillars of species in closely related genera in the Notodontidae are well-surveyed. So, looking at a shrub in the range of Ursia furtiva and finding a caterpillar that fits the bill in terms of expected morphological characters, and being able to rule out its belonging to closely related genera, it's a reasonable leap of logic to attribute the larva to that particular species only previously known by its adult form. It's not "certain" at that point, but as a biologist who spends his life researching those taxa, and knowing well where the missing gaps are, it's the kind of hunch that is very often proved correct.