The larvae are living it large
QUESTION Do any animals get smaller as a normal part of their life cycle?
Many creatures have large larval forms that change into a smaller adult.
The caterpillar is the feeding stage of the life cycle so is essentially a bag of guts. It grows, frequently shedding its skin, before it turns into a pupa.
a butterfly pupa is known as a chrysalis and forms under the last skin to moult. Other lepidopterans, the order of insects that includes butterflies and moths, spin cocoons.
During pupation, the guts break down to a mush and this is regenerated to form the adult. The process uses energy to make this happen. Thus, weight is lost because fat stores are used up in the transformation.
The chrysalis or cocoon made from the larva is discarded, so the butterfly or moth is lighter than the larva. It may look bigger, but this is because it has a lot of air spaces.
We tend to think of the adult as the true organism, but the lifespan of some larvae can be much longer. The adult is simply a winged stage for dispersal and reproduction and so is quickly disposable.
Phil Alexander, Farnborough, Hants. ThIs is common in holometabolous insects, where the egg, larval, pupal and adult are distinct. an extreme example are Goliathus and hercules beetles, among the largest insects. at 40g to 50g the adult weighs half of the final larval stage.
O. Francis, Stroud, Gloucs.
QUESTION Who coined the word dystopia?
DysTOPIa is the opposite of utopia. This concept was coined by sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. his word was a pun, designed to put us in mind of the Greek ou-topos (no place) and eu-topos (good place). More argued that utopias were too good to be true.
If utopia denotes an ideal society, dystopia is a bleak, futuristic one in which there is suffering or injustice. The first use of dystopia is in Utopia: Or apollo’s Golden Days, a 1747 poem attributed to writer Lewis henry younge. he used the word ‘Dustopia’ as a rough opposite for utopia. In a 1748 reprint it became dystopia. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the word dystopian to the Victorian philosopher John stuart Mill, who used it in a speech in the house of Commons in 1868. he said: ‘It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians or caco-topians. What is commonly called utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.’
he was an acolyte of Jeremy Bentham, the proponent of Utilitarianism, who in 1818 had proposed cacotopia, derived from the Greek kako (bad), as the preferred antonym for utopia.
The application to literature dates from the 1960s.
according to a 1967 edition of Listener magazine: ‘The modern classics — aldous huxley’s Brave new World and George Orwell’s nineteen Eighty-Four — are dystopias. They describe not a world we should like to live in, but one we must be sure to avoid.’
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