In the words of Carl Sagan, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” That’s just it, it’s not ‘just us’ and we’re not alone. By this, I mean that each of us and all other animals and plants inhabiting our pale blue dot in the vast cosmic soup of this Universe is inhabited by upwards of trillions of microbes. In fact, some say that we’re just “animals in a bacterial world” (McFall-Ngai et al. 2013). Alas, don’t fear these microbes – that we have categorized into the bacteria, viruses, Archaea, and fungi, and form communities called a ‘microbiome’ – because many are beneficial!
The functional diversity of this community is astounding and spans from nutrient acquisition and metabolism to serving as a protective barrier from pathogens and buffer against environmental variation (McFall-Ngai et al. 2013). As a marine ecologist, it’s the role of environmental variation that has particularly intrigued me – or ‘caught my eye' – because the ocean is unbelievably dynamic and ever changing. Not all plant and animal life stages are equally susceptible or resistant to variation in the vagaries of the ocean such as temperature, salinity, and food availability.