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acorns. When the acorns mature and fall, the larvae drill their way out of
the acorns and into the ground to become brand new beetles. Now, voles
love to eat acorns. Strangely enough, the voles can tell which acorns they
fi nd still have larvae in them. They reject the empty-nest acorns and grab
the ones with larvae, stashing them in the autumn as a food source for
later. Voles like the beetle larvae and eat them up when they can, saving
the acorn itself from lethal damage. The acorns which remain buried in the
ground sprout new oak trees across the range of the voles. And that is how
voles and oak trees and beetles all help themselves out by being in a sym-
biotic relationship.
A rather more complex example is the human body. One cell in ten in
our bodies is actually human; the rest are microbes. Michael Pollan (2013)
says:
To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99
percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this
“second genome,” as it is sometimes called, exerts an infl uence on our
health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from
our parents.
Pollan enumerates many of the services our “microbiome” provide
for us. They occupy niches that might otherwise be claimed by pathogens.
They also help with our bodies' abilities to make neurotransmitters, en-
zymes, certain vitamins and other nutrients, and “a suite of other signaling
molecules that talk to, and infl uence, the immune and metabolic system.”
There is mounting evidence that we can have some infl uence on our mi-
crobiomes' health through diet. Taking a broad-spectrum antibiotic can
create major disturbances by killing off some of the good guys as well as
the targeted pathogens. Then microbes that are usually present in a bal-
anced system can overrun things and create secondary nasty effects. Pass
the probiotics.
This elegant and intricately complicated dance traces some interesting
patterns for interaction designers. The notion of “invasive resistance” is
one. The ability of microbes to evolve quickly under changing conditions
is another. The “unintended consequences” of antibiotics present another
interesting dynamic. I have a gut feeling that a cascade of new scientifi c in-
formation about our microbiome will present more intriguing patterns for
interaction designers to consider.
