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Communities in Mozambique partner with honeyguide birds to discover beehives brimming with sugary, nourishing honey.(Image credit: CLAIRE SPOTTISWOODE via Getty Images)
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The natural world is packed with interconnected relationships: predator and quarry, parasite and its carrier, rival opposing rival. However, an additional, commonly ignored bond entails species interacting for their shared advantage.
These interactions, recognized as mutualisms, can be observed all through the biological realm. As an illustration, leaf-cutter ants team up with fungus colonies that they diligently nurture. Since leaf-cutter ants lack the capability to process plants independently, they cultivate fungi within their habitats and provide them with leaf fragments. The fungi gain an advantage from being actively sustained, and the ants ingest specific fungi to utilize the plant nutrients. Neither species could endure without the other.
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“The Call of the Honeyguide” has been shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a yearly recognition for distinction in nonfiction within the natural or physical sciences. The honor includes a monetary reward of $10,000, with the winners announced at the Literary Awards Ceremony held on March 31.
Live Science interviewed Dunn to discuss his publication and how mutualism lies at the fundamental core of human identity.
Sophie Berdugo: Can you elucidate what mutualisms involve and how your fascination with them began?
Rob Dunn: Mutualisms — in the context that evolutionary biologists and ecologists understand them — are connections between two species where both reap benefits. Therefore, it’s cooperation between species. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists quantify this partnership based on what’s termed fitness: Are the individuals more inclined to live longer and reproduce if they are collaborating with one another?
However, when contemplating modern human mutualisms, evaluating their degree of benefit gets slightly complex. And this particular issue is something I ponder across the span of the book. What constitutes a symbiotic bond with a dog, cat, cow, pig, or wheat crop? Fundamentally, in its most basic form, two species together gain more advantages than if they acted alone.
My interest in them ignited early on in my professional life. I devoted considerable time in tropical regions, places where diverse mutualisms manifest prominently, and gradually became captivated by the varied approaches species in the wild utilize to work together in settings where we often concentrate more on predation, parasitism, and rivalry. This somewhat gentler facet of the natural world — albeit still nuanced — has long captivated me.
SB: What led you to decide on writing this book at this moment?
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RD: Over the last several years, my work has increasingly revolved around human-centered mutualisms and a spectrum of peculiar interdependencies: those involving humans and the microorganisms residing in our navels, humans and the bacteria in sourdough bread, or humans and feline creatures.
As our lives grow progressively digital, our recognition of these omnipresent interconnections diminishes. Despite their continued presence, we tend to neglect them. Today, we appear to be at the height of virtual engagement, directing maximum attention toward screens and indoor spaces, an era unprecedented for such minimal regard for the other species with whom we connect. I felt it was an opportune moment to convey this narrative.
“The Call of the Honeyguide” was nominated for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Additionally, I’ve invested increasing time with archaeologists and anthropologists, who have profoundly revealed the far more extensive diversity of these relationships across both history and cultures than previously thought.
SB: I mean, even now we’re having a virtual interaction! I’m really intrigued by what you were saying there about your work with archaeologists and anthropologists. Could you share some of the insights you’ve learned through those collaborations, and how these mutualisms really teach us about who we are as a species?
RD: One kind of vignette would be thinking about our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, and the mutualisms they engage in. One of the things that’s very clear with chimps is they depend on every one of their actions on the plants that they eat. They depend on the figs for food, and the figs depend on them to disperse their seeds and carry them from one place to another.
That’s a very ancestral relationship for us. We all once lived in trees; we all once benefited from those trees; we all once benefited from those fruits. And so that’s one kind of thing we see in looking to a more ancient past. We still benefit from trees, but the nature of the relationship has changed. I think, often, when we look at other cultural or ancient contexts, there are lessons there, but the lessons are modulated by the way we live now.
Every time you take one of these examples and pick it apart, it gets more complex. The figs depend on the chimps, but the figs also depend on very specific wasps that pollinate them. Each fig species has a different fig-specific wasp. So embedded in the chimp-fig mutualism is this other mutualism, which is so often the case.
To take a very different kind of example, a number of researchers have started to focus on what you might call co-predation, where humans and other species team up to predate a third species. It’s now clear that, in several different human cultures and populations, people have formed partnerships with dolphins — the dolphins help herd fish into a bay, and then humans net the fish. And by netting them, the dolphins get a few more.
This is a relationship people in parts of Brazil still have and it probably emerged culturally many times.
The dolphins seem to be in charge. It’s the dolphins that tell the humans when to gather. It’s one cultural group of dolphins partnering with one cultural group of humans. It’s really an elaborate relationship that depends on particular people, particular dolphins. It’s embedded in culture.
Then there’s the trickiness of nature; this relationship really sucks if you’re the fish.
None of this is ever simple. One way to think about it is if you’re in a mutualism, you’re better than if you’re not. They always involve trade-offs, but nonetheless, [they] are this element in nature that has a different way of working than what we tend to think about.
SB: I’m really intrigued about who may be initiating these mutualisms. Could you explain how mutualisms are formed?
RD: If you think about that human-dolphin mutualism, you have two intelligent sets of beings that are negotiating a relationship in which each is constantly making choices about whether or not to participate.
In this case, it looks like the initiation comes from the dolphins, and then the humans respond.
Other kinds of mutualisms start in simpler ways. Humans partner with yeast and lactic acid bacteria and fruit. In that context, what does that look like to start with? Well, some of our ancestors were choosing fruit that was alcoholic, or lactic, over fruit that wasn’t. They weren’t consciously choosing to engage in a mutualism. They were implicitly choosing one set of species — the ones in those fruits — versus the set of species in a different fruit. They didn’t need to be conscious of it; they just needed to be making a choice.
Beer is the product of a mutualism between humans and yeast.
Over evolutionary time, if you’re not talking about fully conscious choices, mutualism is favored by each partner trying to figure out how to more consistently get the other partner to participate. As the yeast produced more alcohol; our ancestors evolved new ways of processing the alcohol. You get these reciprocal evolutionary changes that favor the persistence of the relationship.
When our ancestors lived in tropical forests and we were trying to get as many calories as possible, those yeast were producing alcohol from the sugars and fruit, which was really rich in calories, which benefited their ancestors.
But it looks very different in [for example] modern Ohio. What’s the relationship between the yeasts that produce alcohol and humans? The yeast are still benefiting.