The Necessary Dissolution

Inside a monarch butterfly's chrysalis, something almost unthinkable happens. Biologists who have carefully opened chrysalises at different stages discovered that the caterpillar doesn't simply rearrange its parts into a new form. It releases enzymes that dissolve nearly all of its own body — muscles, organs, tissue — into a kind of biological soup. For a time, the creature that entered the chrysalis essentially ceases to exist.…