Posted 12/9/2017 5:29 AM (GMT 0)
Carolyn,
Yes, very interesting stuff. I can certainly believe that gut flora can be interconnected with all kinds of things. (I also recall seeing nature films of elephants using their trunks to pull and eat droppings from other elephants. No doubt for some very good reason.) Bacteria rule.
Off Topic: (sort of)
I once read a book that had the imaginative premise that practically all land plants were constructed of little collectives of bags of water - much like sea water - so that the microscopic rootlets of plants could present their moist liquid surfaces to new sources of minerals on the land that were previously inaccessible to life in the oceans. A process involving hundreds of millions of years, and, eventually, great interlocking biological intricacies.
Similarly, mobile, larger, multicellular animal life forms could be conceived of as a way for the myriad of symbiotic bacteria within them to be moved from place to place upon the land or in the waters, while protected in a stable environment, to find and exploit new sources of food and energy.
The primary "actors" were/are the Ocean and the simplest life forms like the Bacteria. Neither have any "brains" to direct them, but given enough time, emergent order arises out of chaos - not so unlike how moving water in streams or air in the sky create well-ordered "ripples" in elegant rows on different physical scales.
Charles