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Podcast: Book Friends Forever
Episode: Metamorphosis by Oren Harman read by Jefferson Mays
Description: A search for the meaning of one of nature’s greatest riddles: why do so many creatures transform?
“How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today, biologists estimate a stunning three-quarters of all animal species on Earth undergo some form of metamorphosis.
But why do tadpoles transform into frogs, caterpillars into butterflies, elvers into eels, immortal jellyfish from sea sprigs to medusae and back again, growing younger and younger in frigid ocean depths? Why mu...