🦋 The butterfly's life begins as a tiny, often ornate egg. As a larva, or caterpillar, its world is an intense sensory experience of taste and texture, driven by a ceaseless, instinctual hunger. Through simple eyes, its view is a blur of light and green as it consumes leaves. The dominant feeling is growth—its skin repeatedly tightening before it molts. A final, powerful urge compels it to hang upside down, its skin splitting one last time to reveal a chrysalis. Inside this living jewel case, it undergoes a profound transformation, dissolving into a cellular soup from which its new body is miraculously rebuilt.⁠ ⁠ The emergence is a struggle from confinement into a vast new world. The adult butterfly, or imago, forces itself from the pupal shell, its wings crumpled and wet. It feels its lifeblood, hemolymph, pulsing into the veins, slowly expanding the delicate, patterned structures. Its new compound eyes see a kaleidoscopic world of color and ultraviolet nectar guides on flowers invi...