Biodiversity Alters Strategies of Bacterial Evolution
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.
In the closing paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin urged readers to “contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Those plants, birds, insects and worms, he continued, all evolved as they did because of the complex web of ecological factors in which they’d been embedded. Had the temperature been hotter, the water more acidic or a certain species of grass absent, a very different “tangled bank” might have evolved instead.
Researchers have typically tried to tease out the evolutionary effects of environmental factors one by one. But the full biodiversity of an environment—the entirety of the tangled bank
