A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
symbiosis
Symbiosis is a close and long-term living together of two different species. In its strict sense, it covers the whole range of such relationships: mutualism, where both benefit; commensalism, where one benefits and the other is unaffected; and parasitism, where one benefits at the other’s cost. In loose modern use it has narrowed to mean mutualism alone.
Etymology
The word is Greek for living together and was given its biological sense in 1879 by the German botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary, who was studying lichens and needed a term for what he was looking at. Albert Frank had coined a related term slightly earlier while working on the same problem, and Frank went on to coin mycorrhiza.
Notes
The idea turned out to reach further than anyone intended. The mitochondria in every cell of your body and the chloroplasts in every plant were once free-living bacteria taken up by another cell, an argument made by Lynn Margulis in 1967 against considerable resistance and now standard. A lichen, which prompted the word in the first place, has since been shown to involve at least three partners rather than two.