I Contain Multitudes

At Princeton University, environmental microbiologist Xinning Zhang talks to Ed Yong about the 150 million year old partnership between wood-chomping termites and the gut microbes that enable them to digest their meals. Ed also explores how the microbes in our own bodies help us digest the plants we eat.

Ed Yong heeds the warning of scientists who study antibiotic resistance, as they work feverishly at the Kishony lab in Israel to understand how bacterium evolve and change. If we do not change the way we prescribe and take medication, Ed explains why the drugs we take for granted may soon be no match against deadly bacteria.

Ed Yong marvels that giant tubeworms can survive in the unforgiving environment at the bottom of the ocean, a place that sunlight will never reach. It was through these mysterious creatures that biologist Colleen Cavanaugh of Harvard University made an astonishing discovery about the earliest form of life on earth.

Science is inching closer to an unlikely solution to Dengue fever. Bacteria.

Dr. Martin Kaltenpoth invites Ed to burrow into a beewolf lair in his German lab, where he has discovered something really weird about these insects. Ed observes the antibiotic properties of Streptomyces, a microbe that lives happily inside a mama Beewolf’s antenna until the moment arrives to share the bacterial gift with her developing and vulnerable offspring.

Ed Yong wants to learn how to become invisible. In nature, that can be a handy superpower if you are a favorite snack of several underwater predators. The Hawaiian bobtail squid has learned to master this trick. But it can’t do this alone. It has help from its microbes. Microscopic organisms inhabit the squid’s light organ, and they are the secret to the bobtail squid’s ability to turn invisible.