Gottlieb - Natural attraction: a field guide to friends, frenemies, and other symbiotic animal relationships

For my own symbiotic creature, Bunny the dog

Contents

Hawaiian Bobtail Squid and Aliivibrio Fischeri
(Bioluminescent Bacteria)

Best buds, frenemies, freeloaders, bullies, copycats, hangers-on, teammates, roommates, landlords, neighbors, homewreckers, collaborators, fakers, manipulators, stone-faced killers. Were accustomed to all types of people and human interactions. But animal relationships can be just as weird and complex.

In fact, they can be a lot weirder: throughout the natural world, birds, mammals, reptiles, plants, insects, fish, algae, fungi, and bacteria form unusual partnerships with other species. There arent enough relationship-status updates in the universe to cover the ingenious bonds that animals form with each other: tarantula-frog roomies; fish-eel hunting dances; aphid-milking ant farms. The creatures and combinations are sundry and strange.

Sometimes these odd relationships benefit both parties. Flowers attract insects and birds, for instance, which spread pollen and seeds and ensure that the plant reproduces. Insects and birds, in turn, get a lifetime of meals out of the arrangement.

Sometimes the relationships appear to benefit only one species, like birds that build their nests near wasp colonies to ward off predators. And sometimes one creatures very existence depends on it harming the other: beetles that lay their eggs in, and thereby doom, forest pine trees, for instance, or fungi that propagate by transforming insects into zombies.

No matter who comes out ahead, all of these relationships are considered to be symbiotic: species living in close association with each otherfor better or for worse.

Symbiotic relationships play a huge role in driving and shaping evolution. Species evolve in response to one another to suit their own survival needsdeveloping, in some cases, really bizarre traits along the way (such as crustacean fish-tongue impersonation and octopus identity theft). Even in death, symbiosis continues. A dead whale carcass may nourish sea-floor dwellers for up to two hundred years. A fallen redwood provides a nutrient-rich home for generations of plants, fungi, and animals. Symbiotic relationships can, indeed, form the bedrock of entire ecosystems, and if these connections come undone, whole systems can collapse.

No manor animal, or plant, or fungusis an island. These strange and astounding natural relationships serve as a reminder, if ever there was one, that all life is intertwined. (Relationship status: its complicated.)

We need each other. Even when, sometimes, we also eat each other.