 It has long been recognized that some biological individuals, such as flukes, have life cycles that take them literally through one or more hosts, and that many insects undergo significant metamorphic changes in bodily form through their life cycle. But such sophistications to life cycles are only the tip of the iceberg here. While the stages themselves often form standard sequences within particular species, there can be tremendous variation across species and phyla in what a given individual’s life cycle consists in, as others have emphasized (Buss 1987), including in recent discussions of complex life cycles (Godfrey-Smith 2016b, 2016d; Griesemer 2016; Herron 2016; O’Malley 2016; cf. Gerber 2018). 