“What brought you to the Galápagos?” I ask, leaning against the table behind me. Something buzzes near my ear and I peer over my shoulder. A case full of flittering ladybugs is sitting on a shelf directly behind my head.

He flashes a wide, bucktoothed grin. “Love and bugs.”

Analisa chuckles. “Mostly bugs.”

“All love,” he says softly, wrapping an arm around his wife’s shoulders and tucking her into his side. “I never thought I’d leave Australia, but it turns out I’d follow this woman anywhere.”

My throat tightens reflexively and I cough to clear it. I don’t look at Graeme. “Why the ladybugs?” I ask. “They’re not native to the Galápagos, are they?”

Graeme meanders over to Analisa and they begin chatting.

“Ahh, no, they’re not. Excellent observation.” Doug taps a finger against the side of his wide nose and strides over to the container of ladybugs. “These beauties helped us fight a nasty invader a few years back called the cottony cushion scale. But don’t be fooled by the name, the destruction those buggers caused was anything but cute and fluffy.”

Reaching to a higher shelf, he pulls down a clear container the size of a shoebox. Inside, an insect that looks like a white, fuzzy squirt of toothpaste clings to a leafy twig.

“They attach themselves to woody plants and suck the sap, draining their vitality. They hitched a ride to the Galápagos years ago, and it was a disaster. So many of the plants here are endemic, found nowhere else on earth, and species on entire islands were in decline. So we brought in a secret weapon: the cottony cushion scale’s greatest enemy.”

With a flourish, he flips the lid on the ladybug enclosure, reaches in, and scoops up a single ladybug with his finger.

I lift my eyebrows. “Ladybugs?”

He holds it out to me, and I let it crawl onto my knuckles. I giggle at the ticklish sensation of tiny legs scurrying over my skin.

“Right-o. Ladybugs naturally attack cottony cushion scales. After we released them in quantity on the affected islands, the scales weren’t a problem anymore and endemic plant populations recovered.”

Grinning, I gently brush the ladybug off my wrist back into its plastic home. As Doug shuts the lid and returns the case to its spot on the shelf, I stroll over to the microscope he was looking through when we came in. “What are you working on now?”

“Ahh,” he says, his voice dropping. “A problem we haven’t found a solution for, I’m afraid.” Pulling a tray toward me, he lifts the cover off. I recoil reflexively.

A featherless baby bird with gray sightless eyes is lying on the tray—dead. Next to it, a petri dish contains what looks like half a dozen fat brown grubs.

“What happened to it?”