Ed Yong‘s I Contain Multitudes gives you the secret tour of the amazing world of beneficial microbial-host interactions and the passionate, quirky scientists driving the work. The importance of microbes to humans hit the media with a superhero-sized *TWACK* 5 to 7 years ago, when data from the Human Microbiome Project began to be published. Since then, the human microbiome has been implicated in everything from obesity and diabetes to anxiety and autism. Scores of books, good and not so, have been written in these early years of the microbiome, yet they all focus on the HUMAN microbiome. As a science blogger for National Geographic and writer for The Atlantic, Ed became engrossed with microbial-host interactions. If you’ve read a recent article on the human microbiome, chances are it was one of his. Here’s the secret  – people have been studying microbial-host interactions in insects, squid, plants, lichens, corals, and other mammals – for centuries! We often know MORE about how these other microbes interact with their hosts during development, on a molecular, cellular, ecological, and evolutionary aspect than we do with human-microbe interactions. In fact, it’s this amazing field of non-human-microbe interactions that is the foundation the human microbiome work often