I'm Flora Lichtenen and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show are partnerships with other species and questions about who's actually in the driver's seat of those relationships.

And to me, what's most amazing about it is it's initiated by the Honey Guide.

And so the Honey Guide says to the humans,

do you want to partner? And then the humans get to choose, yeah.

Codependency sometimes gets a bad rap, you know, when you become so entwined with your other half that you

cannot survive without them. But as it turns out, in nature, there's a lot of codependency,

species that rely on each other for survival. And my next guest argues that these mutualistic

relationships across species are the story of life on Earth.

Joining me now is Rob Dunn, ecologist and author of the new book, The Call of the Honey Guide.

He's based in North Carolina.

Rob, welcome back to Science Friday.

Oh, it's so great to be on this show, Flora. Thank you.

This book includes a lot of cool animal stories, but it goes way beyond that. I feel like you're

really offering a kind of different philosophy of how we should think about biology and evolution.

Will you just give us your vision?

So for most of my career, I've just been interested in the positive relationships among species.

So the mutualisms where two or more species benefit each other.

And for me, that's always been the most obvious thing to look at.

As I've gone through my career, I've realized it's not the thing we most often study.

And I became fascinated with these relationships, but also the reality that we don't seem

to tell the story of our human positive relationships with other species, those codependencies.

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