Ecology Without Species?

Until recently, microbiology has been a science done largely in petri dishes, looking at a few million copies of one organism and asking simple questions trying to suss out how it'll behave in the wider world. What does it eat? Does it breathe air like we do, or is it an anaerobe, to which oxygen means death? Now, however, there's a radical new understanding sweeping the scientific world--and researchers are having to devise new tools to keep up.Part of this revolution is the knowledge that we a...