Endosymbiosis influenced Margulis’s view of the world throughout her career. She was drawn to the connections between living things, and she realised that every creature lives in communities with many others. In 1991, she coined a word to describe this unity: holobiont, from the Greek for ‘whole unit of life’.22 It refers to a collection of organisms that spend significant parts of their lives together. The beewolf holobiont is the wasp plus all the bacteria in its antennae. The Ed Yong holobiont is me plus my bacteria, fungi, viruses, and more.
