Many people think of bacteria as tiny Lone Rangers, paddling their flagellar canoes across the desolate petri dish sea. But in “the wild", bacteria exist as complex, interwoven, constantly competing social communities.
Every scoop of soil is a battlefield of chemical chatter. Species send out molecular messages-in-a-bottle that ride the waves of diffusion to their mates. Some even thread electrical cables between neighboring cells. Now, new research has identified elaborate shared membranes that let single cells swarm as a superorganism …


 No bacterium is an island.