Sort of.

Scientists at Georgetown University say they are unlocking part of a 100-year-old quandary over what remains of the lumbering leaf-chomping worm after metamorphosis transforms it into a winged marvel sipping nectar from a bloom.

"A caterpillar goes into a phone booth and out comes a butterfly, and the extra ingredients are not delivered to the phone booth," says biologist Martha Weiss, senior author of a report March 5 in the journal PLoS One.

A larva has muscles, a gut, tracheal tube and stubby legs - all made of tissue that is broken down and reordered into wings and other parts. The larva brain is pruned back and retrofitted, becoming a much bigger and more elaborate organ. It seemed impossible that any memory could be retained.

Enter Weiss and the tobacco hornworm caterpillar. Using electric shocks, she and colleague Doug Blackiston trained late-stage caterpillars to avoid the smell of ethyl acetate, which is similar to a whiff of nail polish.

As fully emerged adults, the moths displayed the aversion.

"Some neurons are probably retained from the larva brain and still function in an adult," says Weiss, an expert on learning and behavior in lepidoptera.

She is unsure what kind of information may be retained in nature, but speculates that moths and butterflies may recall the host plant upon which it fed as a larva and return there to lay its eggs. Or maybe, she says, it doesn't retain anything at all.

After all, what butterfly would want to remember it was once a larva?

- John Sullivan