26 Quotes by Ed Yong

Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.

So females, by mating with the right partners, can suddenly become immune to wasp attacks, which makes Hamiltonella that rarest of things: a desirable venereal infection.28.

The citrus mealybug is a living matryoshka doll. It has bacteria living inside its cells, and those bacteria have more bacteria living inside them. Bugs within bugs within bugs.

And the most extreme examples of this mutually assured success can be found in the deep oceans, where some microbes supplement their hosts to such a degree that the animals can eat the most impoverished diets of all – nothing. In.

All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.

The brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii is another puppetmaster. It can only sexually reproduce in a cat; if it gets into a rat, it suppresses the rodent’s natural fear of cat odours and replaces it with something more like sexual attraction. The rodent scurries towards nearby cats, with fatal results, and T. gondii gets to complete its life cycle.50 The.

Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19.

It’s hard stuff, this science business, but someone’s got to do it. For.

Our darkest fiction is full of Orwellian dystopias, shadowy cabals, and mind-controlling supervillains. But it turns out that the brainless, microscopic, single-celled organisms that live inside us have been pulling on our strings all along. On.