10/07/2026
Every child is a ‘scientist’… the question is whether the environment allows…
Jo Nagai was eight years old when he noticed something strange about the butterflies he raised at home. The ones he had looked after since they were caterpillars behaved differently from wild ones. They would flutter toward him when he walked into the room, almost as if they recognized him.
So he asked a question that professional scientists had never fully answered for butterflies: do they remember being caterpillars?
Jo had read about a study by Professor Martha Weiss at Georgetown University, who had shown that moths could retain memories from their larval stage. But nobody had conclusively demonstrated the same for butterflies, and nobody had tested whether those memories could pass to the next generation.
So Jo set up his own experiment at home. He raised swallowtail caterpillars and trained them to dislike the smell of lavender oil by pairing it with a mild shock from a muscle therapy device. After they completed metamorphosis and emerged as butterflies, he tested whether they still reacted to the lavender scent.
They did. The memories had survived the transformation.
But Jo didn't stop there. He ran the experiment again, this time testing the butterflies' offspring to see if the aversion had been inherited. A few months later he wrote to Professor Weiss with the results. The second generation avoided the lavender smell too. The memories had passed down to their children.
Jo was 10 years old when he sent those findings to Weiss, translated into English. She was stunned. Dr. Akito Kawahara, a professional entomologist who met Jo at a scientific conference, said his work was university level, remarkable by any standard, let alone for a child presenting at a school science fair.