What is a Superorganism?
A superorganism is any aggregate of individual organisms that behaves like a unified organism. Members of a superorganism have highly specialized social cooperative instincts, divisions of labor, and are unable to survive away from their superorganism for very long. The standard example of a superorganism is an ant colony, but there are many others — termite mounds, bee hives, wasp nests, coral reefs, fungal colonies, groves of genetically identical trees, etc. Some have suggested that humans are each a superorganism, because in every typical human being is over 1013 to 1014 microorganisms performing a variety of tasks, but mainly helping with digestion. Microorganisms in the human body outnumber our cells over 10-to-1, and their genetic material outnumbers ours 100-to-1. Many of these have not been isolated or studied. The Human microbiome project, a $115 million US Dollars project by the National Institutes of Health, aims to identify and characterize as many of these microorganisms
