| Burns Bog offers the opportunity to see living organisms and the physical environment acting together to produce a self-sustaining ecosystem, a superorganism. |
| The task scientists now face is the reconstruction of the superorganism. |
| The notion of a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in other fields have come to view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. |
| For the latest research shows their physiologies are linked in ways which make the idea of a human superorganism more than just a rhetorical flourish. These links are most visible when they go wrong. |
| One can thus consider each human as a superorganism able to host bacteria which enable him to increase the diversity of its genome of more than 100 times. |
| The superorganism approach may help researchers better understand how diet, chemicals and other environmental factors affect health, for instance. |
