Lesson 3: Resilience and Adaptability
Prompts for after the lesson as you study:
How can the smalls teach us to rein in our overconsumption?
How can I relate myself (and a small being) to a larger, resilient network for a sense of resilience larger than myself? Is there anything the smalls can teach about responding to "negative" adaptations, like trauma responses?
It's so easy for humans to anthropomorphize everything, especially by imposing emotions on everything. Is there an emotional component to the smalls? Do they "feel"?
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this lesson, students should be able to:
Discuss the strategies that multicellular and single-celled people employ to handle varied tasks
Start thinking about the personhood of viruses
Discuss the emergence of disease as a result of the non-consensual activity of humans
Understand the benefits of being small
Understand the benefits of diversity in the microbial world
Describe the relationship between V. fischeri and the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid
Discuss the function of taboos
Additional Resources
Additional resources are posted here for your general interest - the following aren’t integral to the learning but may be supportive. They include music, articles, interviews, writing, and primary scientific literature which you may (or may not) find interesting.
Recommended Listening
Articles and Scientific Papers
These tiny microbes are munching away at plastic waste in the ocean
Radiation-eating bacteria could make nuclear waste safer
The wreck of the Titanic is being eaten
The plan to use fungus to mop up the world’s largest oil spill
How mushrooms can save the world
Scientists waited two and half years to see whether bacteria can eat rock