Microorganisms, macroorganisms and ecology

The last two decades have witnessed unprecedented advances in our knowledge of the microbial world. This is due largely to the development of culture-independent techniques (Olsen et al. , 1986; Amann et al. , 1995) that have permitted the detection and a degree of characterization (Gray & Head, 2001) of the elusive majority of microorganisms that remain to be reliably cultivated in the laboratory. The ultimate expression of the technical innovations that have allowed us to observe that part of the microbial world that was previously invisible to us, has been found in the recent massive molecular surveys of microbial genome fragments recovered directly from the environment (Venter et al. , 2004; Sogin et al. , 2006; Rusch et al. , 2007). Such developments, and those aimed at more directed measurement of the abundance and properties of defined groups of organisms, have led microbial ecologists from a world that was limited by the availability of appropriate measurement tools to one which is limited by our ability to organize and interpret the data that our, now bulging, toolbox provides. In contrast, theoretical …