The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes

  • Nicholas P. Money
Oxford University Press: 2014. 9780199941315 | ISBN: 978-0-1999-4131-5

The vast populations of the microscopic — warring, cooperating, dispersing and communicating — have a dizzying array of strategies and forms. These denizens of the universe at the far end of a microscope have much to teach humanity, their roles ranging from the digestion of food to the cycling of carbon and nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere. Several books have championed matters microbial in recent years. The latest, biologist Nicholas Money's The Amoeba in the Room, is filled with an impassioned fascination for microscopic life around and within us, in both the prokaryotic and eukaryotic domains. Money recognizes that animals and plants are an “evolutionary afterthought” — as he writes, “the least part of life”.

My interests tend toward the bacterial, viral and archaeal. Money covers this territory thoroughly, and goes beyond to sing the praises of fungi, algae and protists. Among others, he evocatively describes the water mould Haptoglossa, which uses microbial artillery to attack and consume nematode worms; Cryptomonas, a “Russian nesting doll” of an alga, evolved from four different organisms; and Polychaos dubium, a huge amoeba with perhaps the largest amount of DNA to be found in a nucleus. Overall, Money delivers a heady mixture of history, philosophy, art and even poetry: the chapters are prefaced with lines from John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Colonies of Volvox aureus algae, pregnant with daughter colonies. Credit: Lebendkulturen.de/Shutterstock

Money begins with a 'macro' view of his garden pond, then dives into intricate details of the microbial populations in and around it. The seemingly uninhabited water swarms with communities as complex as any seen with the naked eye, and a tree branch is revealed as home to populations of interacting microbes. Money's point is that the diversity of life is clear enough on the macroscopic scale, but the organismal diversity of the microbial world is staggering. I particularly appreciated reading about the eight supergroups of microbial eukaryotes, including some familiar “animalcules” (such as the mitochondria-free pathogen Giardia, found among the Excavata).

Seemingly uninhabited water swarms with communities and complex as any seen with the naked eye.

A chapter on microscopy takes the reader from Assyrian craftsmen to familiar names such as seventeenth-century microbiological pioneers Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, as well as characters with whom I was not familiar. Bénédict Prévost, for instance, presented evidence that microbes can cause disease 50 years before Louis Pasteur, whereas Henry Baker popularized the use of microscopes to observe tiny wonders in 1742. We meet Ed Ricketts, US marine biologist and co-author of Between Pacific Tides (1939), as well as sculpture-like coccolithophores, numerous Prochlorococcus and ubiquitous marine bacteriophages. As in the rest of the book, Money enthusiastically presents evidence of diversity everywhere, no matter the magnification.

Money's tour of the air and its inhabitants reveals an intriguing experiment conducted by US aviator Charles Lindbergh, famous for making the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927. In the 1930s, the US Department of Agriculture asked Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, to gather air samples in a bid to understand the dispersal of cereal rusts. The two collected abundant rust spores using a plane fitted with a sky-hook, a device incorporating oiled microscope slides. Money also discusses how more recent researchers have speculated that some bacteria and microscopic algae control cloud formation and rainfall.

The co-evolution of human and microbe is amply explored. Those that cause disease or death — think pathogenic bacteria, flu viruses, malaria — have shaped our history. But, as researchers have discovered in the past century, the human body could not function without the estimated thousands of species of bacteria that inhabit our mouths, guts and other recesses. Like the pond and branch that Money probes early on, a human can be seen as a collection of ecological niches, albeit a mobile one. Money goes on to discuss seemingly inhospitable environments (such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents, acidic areas or regions bombarded with high levels of radiation) in which microbes — such as archaeans that can grow at 121 °C — prosper. He sums up with distressing prospects for extinctions and change, but also reassures: the microbial world is one of prodigious diversity, power and resilience.

This is a lucid and informative book. There is an impressive afterword of references and notes, and fine line drawings. So much that is lyrical and little-known waits to be discovered here — novelties that will appeal to new undergraduates as well as to incorrigible microbial enthusiasts like myself.