Spiritual Lessons from Biology

The Alcon Blue butterfly has a fascinating life cycle.   A mother butterfly carefully lays her eggs along the blue petals of the marsh gentian flower, high up where predators cannot eat them.   Down below, all manner of creepy crawly things would just love to gobble up those eggs.   Usually, if a caterpillar hatches and accidentally falls to the ground, it is quickly consumed by a wasp or an ant.   Yet, biologists were surprised to discover that a couple of weeks after the Alcon Blue caterpillars hatched, they deliberately launched themselves off of their protective flowers and into the dangerous world below.   The larvae were quickly overrun with ants and carried away.   How were the butterflies coming back each spring, if in their larval state they seemed self-destructive?   Eventually it was discovered that these butterflies are myrmecophylous, meaning they have a positive association with ants.  When the ants took them back to the nest, it was not to eat them, but to raise them as