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As far as metaphors for change go, this is a powerful one. Yet when we think about the future and the change we want to make, the natural world offers all kinds of models and lessons.
“What about the downy cockroach or the downy ear bug?” He says Jessica Ware, associate curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, rolls his eyes. (Or Impler’s gum-leaf skeleton.) According to some estimatesaround 60 percent of all animals Go beyond what scientists call it Holometabolism– A fancy term for reforming your entire body like butterflies. Female insects, Beetles, bees, LacewingsAnd Flies Everyone shuts down and goes through an incredible transition. “You know, there’s a lot of really cool insects out there, but they don’t have any pressure, they don’t have greeting cards. It’s all butterflies, butterflies, butterflies,” Ware says.
The natural world is full of stories of change, cooperation and change. Stories we can all learn from.
Some sea snails, for example, eat algae and actually extract chloroplasts from that algae and use it to photosynthesize themselves. OthersSnails feed on poisonous algae They store the venom in their bodies to use as a defense mechanism. For Spade, this ties into the idea that a team can share different skill sets and attributes with each other. “We can all be talented, and we can draw on the really interesting skills that different people on the team bring.” For Dean, it’s a reminder that “we are each a very small part of something much bigger.”
To Liz Neely, science communicator and company founder liminalIt is a giant, Dark looking fish It provides a metaphor for change. She points to the mola mola, also known as the giant ocean sunfish. Giant isn’t an exaggeration—by the time they’re adults, these fish can weigh more than 4,000 pounds. But they don’t start life big. They are about 3 millimeters long at birth.Half the length of a grain of rice. During its lifetime, a mola mola increases its body mass by 60 A million times. It changes almost everything. “Your ability to sense your environment, the things you’re afraid of, no matter how hard you try to get into the water,” says Neely. “Water at that level is heavy, dense, shiny. You’re swimming through the syrup.
So the giant, car-sized fish swims through the ocean, small and vulnerable, swimming against the muck. “I don’t know how big a fish I am,” says Neely. “But I hope I can continue to develop a practice of rethinking those basic assumptions about myself in the world, and what’s threatening to me and how I move past it.”
I bring all this up because, basically, my podcast, Flash forward, was about change. How does one change the future? How do we achieve the tomorrow we want? A key part of that question has to do with the way insects molt themselves into goo. Do we have to completely dissolve ourselves and our world to have the future we want? Should we burn it all down, destroy it all, and rebuild it from that melting point? Or do we slowly evolve as we go along, gradually becoming more and more like hermit crabs?
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