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Hello, I'm Dr Sally LePage and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I'm a biologist and have spent many years of my life studying tiny fruit flies in the lab.

But recently, within the scientific community, there's been a lot of

buzz about the social behaviours of much smaller creatures, bacteria. Bacteria are everywhere.

They live among us and inside us, and although made up of a single cell, they behave in all

sorts of surprising ways,

from killing family members to blowing themselves up for the collective good.

We have these incredible examples of almost time travel.

You might get certain members in the population that actually become cheaters.

It's a bacterial warfare on their feet every single second.

They change what behaviors they carry out based on whether they're around friends or

enemies.

Understanding the behavior of these microbes helps scientists fight disease.

And later, I'll be visiting a lab at the forefront of this battle.

Prepare yourself for a weird, microscopic world and the social lives of bacteria.

Just like human beings, bacteria are capable of a whole range of unusual and often contradictory behaviours.

Unlike us, they split themselves in two to reproduce

and have a lifespan ranging anywhere from 12 minutes to millions of years.

Professor Bonnie Bassler from Princeton University in the United States.

Bacteria are the world's first organisms, so they're the most ancient critters.

They are more different from each other than we are from a yeast, for example, or from a dog or from a plant.

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