“Did you know there’s a kind of butterfly,” I told Ruth, our sweating knees slicked together in the backseat of my dad’s car—he was driving us to the hospital—“that makes ants raise its young?” “How does it do that?” My father craned his neck to look back at us through the rearview mirror. His radio blared cheerful, innocuous country music. “The larva of the Alcon blue butterfly smells like an ant baby to an ant, so the ants take them back into the nest and raise them. And the ants feed them more than even their own babies.”
