A 2025 New York Times’ Notable Book of the Year, ecologist Rob Dunn’s The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life, beautifully illustrates the myriad ways that humans are part of a living web of interdependence with other animals, plants, yeast, fungi, and microbes. Ecologists call these beneficial relationships mutualisms, and these relationships are foundational to thriving in a living world.
In the below conversation, Rob Dunn and Anabel González, Good Bacteria’s founder, dig into some of the book’s teachings, and explore ways that having a relationship to our personal and planetary microbial systems connects us with new parts of ourselves, the landscape, and each other.
Anabel González: You’ve studied mutualism across your career. Why is this story so important to tell now?
Rob Dunn: For ecologists, mutualism is a core part of how we think about interactions in the living world. We depend on relationships with other species that we don’t seem to have a way of considering in English and western science.
We're in a weird, destabilized moment in our relationships with the rest of life that might allow us to start new kinds of conversations. Part of what I want to do is to remind us that we, like other species, are dependent on tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of other species. That dependency means we have to find ways to tend to those relationships. And if we're not aware of those relationships, we can't conceivably tend to them effectively.
AG: Why did humans detach from the idea that we’re all in this bucket of mutualism?
RD: One version of the answer would be that in the Abrahamic religions, especially in Christianity, theologians consider humans to be separate from the rest of life. This sense of separateness is deeply embedded in western science.
I think another part is the industrialization of agriculture and food systems. Many of us are alive because of it, and yet that separateness is being reinforced. I recently had a great meeting with a chef, and I was talking about seed dispersal and how there's a set of plant species that evolve to be eaten by animals. That was the first exposure that chef ever had to the idea of dispersal—what a fruit is doing so that other species are eating it.
I work in a relatively rural state, North Carolina, where many of our students come from rural counties, but most of them now know very little about how their food has grown. We're so unencumbered by knowledge of nature that now we have an opportunity to retell our story—we get a redo.
I had the privilege to give a talk alongside Yvette Running Horse Collin, a Lakota scholar, who was talking about what it means to think about the non-human world in a Lakota context. What I understood was that microbes in the Lakota language are “little relatives.” From a western science standpoint, this is absolutely true, and yet could not be further from how we talk about microbes in English. There's something really hopeful about that: we know there are other ways of being and speaking of relating, and they are available to us if we're willing to pay attention. That feels hopeful to me.
AG: I particularly liked the ways that the mutualism between the human, honeyguide bird, and bees are woven into stories and the culture. In your research have you come across any stories that tell about mutualism between humans and bacteria?
RD: I'm not the best person to speak on it, but there is the idea that bread is the body of Christ and that wine is the blood of Christ. Somewhere under there, you are talking about those microbes. Aminah Al-Attas Bradford is a theologian I have the pleasure of working with. I think Aminah would say that the relationship between yeast and lactic acid bacteria and the Christian tradition, but also the Jewish tradition, has elements of culturally encoded mutualism.
Across cultures, there are stories where the product has a central place. I've looked a fair amount for other kinds of ethnographies that would be attentive to microbes. And there's not a ton, but I hypothesize that if we look across cultures and how people think about the work of microbes, it often plays an essential cultural role. We have failed to mind that.
AG: How can recognizing the ways that mutualism works in our own bodies help us take better care of our bodily and planetary systems?
RD: It's useful to have your standard way of being, disrupted, and to confront the weirdness of being alive. Earlier in my career I did this work with Joana Ricou, an amazing artist. We imagined that if we had people swab their microbes and tell them what the microbes were, that would engender a better relationship. My sense of the work is that we did the opposite, that we inadvertently made people go home and scrub.
In a different intervention, Joana had people swab and then talk to their belly button microbes. It was so moving because it caused people to have to think: what have I done to you? What should I say to you? What do you do for me? My perception is that speaking to their microbes had a more positive impact on people's relationship with their microbes than anything else that we did. Speaking for myself as a scientist, I recognize that artists are so much better suited to have the conversations that really change how people live. They find ways to disrupt your ordinary life or to disrupt other people's lives. What does that look like? What does it look like in your practice of being human?
AG: What is your take on probiotics and what do you think about Good Bacteria's approach to probiotics?
RD: There's tons of wisdom in thinking about what we feed our microbes and what microbes we feed to ourselves. I think it's a messy landscape. Being able to provide consumers with an understanding of what we know and don't know will also helping them to see some version of this clearly makes sense and we will get better at it
I think what Veronica Sinotte, who we work with on these ant yogurts in Turkey and Bulgaria, would say is that what's beneficial to health is being part of that whole—being part of that cultural tradition and being in relation to the cow, in relation to the grass, in relation to the ants. What does it look like to offer whole relations to people? What is it we want? This goes back to what I think about in the book, in our mutualisms, what do we ask? We have to be asking for something more than just longevity.
AG: It's connection. That's what we're all yearning for. It's a very compelling thing to just sit with and connect to the whole world in that way. And I think that we just so desperately need that.
RD: The archeologist, Kathryn Grossman told me the other day that for archeologists, the word herd means the sheep or the goats, but also the dog, the human family, and the whole landscape. What a great sentiment. What's our collective microbial herd?