Living Together

Season 2: Symbiosis, A Return to Nature Stories

Season 2: Symbiosis Table of Contents

Week 1: You Scratch my Back, I’ll Scratch Yours

Week 2: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Anemones?

Week 3: Size and Smarts Aren’t Everything

Week 4: The Birds and the Bees

Week 5: Along for the Ride

Week 6: Dig a Little Deeper

Week 7: Getting Attached

Week 8: Flocking Together

Week 9: They’re Inside You

Week 10: Sucking You Dry

Week 11: In Your Nest, Eating Your Food

Week 12: Beware the Nosferatu

Hello everyone and welcome back. It’s been about one month since my last story, and I admit that I have missed writing. However, I haven’t been idle during this time. I have been reviewing my first group of stories and deciding how I would like to move forward, with some help and advice from my brother, Nelson.

I decided that I wanted a bit more long-term structure to my stories. While a few of them (like the stories on naming animals and treating wildlife like pets) flowed naturally together, the overall feel of the stories over the previous six months felt very disjointed to me, as I was often coming up with my stories based on whatever I could think of at the time.

In order to achieve this, I am proceeding with a suggestion from Nelson to treat my stories in a fashion similar to television and have ‘seasons’. Each season will have its own theme and the stories within will build upon that theme and each other. Each season would include twelve to thirteen stories followed by a one month break in order to work on outlining the next season. This will allow me to cover each theme thoroughly without it becoming stale. So, without further ado, welcome to Season 2 of Nature Stories. I hope you all enjoy the journey ahead.

The theme for this season is: symbiosis. What does that mean? Symbiosis is a compound word from Greek (it’s not necessary to know Greek and Latin roots in order to understand science, but sometimes it does come in handy). ‘Sym’ means ‘together’ and ‘biosis’ means ‘mode of life’. Combining them gives us ‘living together’.

Symbiosis, noun, an interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association

While the word itself can be used in different contexts, in biology ‘symbiosis’ is specifically used to describe relationships between individuals of different species. This means that the pair of diamondback terrapins, Malachlemys terrapin, pictured above would not qualify.

While symbiosis generally gives the connotation of mutual benefit, this is actually only one type of symbiosis. Each type is classified based on what level of benefit or harm occurs to each of the species in the symbiotic relationship. If both species receive a benefit from the interaction, this is known as mutualism, sometimes abbreviated ‘+ +’. If instead only one species benefits, but the other is not affected, either positively or negatively, it is called commensalism or ‘+ 0’. If the benefiting organism harms the partner, it is referred to as parasitism or ‘+ -’.

There are dozens, even hundreds, of examples of each of these forms of symbiosis. For this season, I am going to be sharing stories from just twelve, four for each of the main types. We’ll stick to one type at a time and not jump around, starting with mutualism next week. I already have most of my symbiosis stories selected, but they’re not all set in stone. If any of you know of interesting examples that you would like me to talk about, please write me a note and I’ll see what I can do.