1. Introduction -- 2. The diversity of animal life -- 3. Origin stories -- 4. Phylosymbiosis from Hydra to man: novel genomic approaches discover the holobiont -- 5. Negotiations between evolving animals and symbionts -- 6. The Hydra holobiont -- 7. Microbes are part of the innate immune system -- 8. Rethinking the origin of immunity -- 9. The coral holobiont -- 10. Are coral reefs doomed? -- 11. Lessons from Hydra and corals -- 12. Hidden impact of viruses.

This book examines how the growing knowledge of the huge range of animal-bacterial interactions, whether in shared ecosystems or intimate symbioses, is fundamentally altering our understanding of animal biology. Individuals from simple invertebrates to human are not solitary, homogenous entities but consist of complex communities of many species that likely evolved during a billion years of coexistence. Defining the individual microbe-host conversations in these consortia, is a challenging but necessary step on the path to understanding the function of the associations as a whole. The hologenome theory of evolution considers the holobiont with its hologenome as a unit of selection in evolution. This new view may have profound impact on understanding a strictly microbe/symbiont-dependent life style and its evolutionary consequences. It may also affect the way how we approach complex environmental diseases from corals (coral bleaching) to human (inflammatory bowel disease etc). The book is written for scientists as well as medically interested persons in the field of immunobiology, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine and corals.