Sitting on her dirt throne and swollen with eggs, a termite queen is tended to by her sterile subjects. All of the insects in the colony are specialists in what they do: Workers forage and construct the mound, while soldiers defend it from invaders. Division of labor among social insects maximizes efficiency to ensure that the royal genes make it to the next generation. Yet, teeming in the soil around them, a similar scenario plays out in a whole other domain of life.
The evolution of bacteria has a lot in common with higher eukaryotes such as birds and bees, said Ákos Kovács, a microbiologist at the Technical University of Denmark. Studying single-celled organisms may help scientists better understand multicellular life, he added.
Kovács’s team investigates “sociomicrobiology,” an emerging field that examines the rich social lives of microbes. In contrast to the free-living, or planktonic, bacteria commonly studied in the ...
