Through the Looking-Glass

Introduction

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  In it, Lewis Carroll up-ends ordinary reality by having Alice crawl through a mirror (a ‘looking-glass’) to see what it's like in the world of the mirror's reflection.

Looking at things that way led to all sorts of strange confusions and downright absurdities.  But with this story, Lewis Carroll challenges us to see things differently, particularly in a way that is opposite to our habitual way of seeing and thinking about things.

When applied thoughtfully, looking at things from the opposite direction can lead to new perspectives on familiar things, and it may suggest some paths to understanding that we might not otherwise have seen.

In this same spirit, let’s take a look at the microbial community, or microbiota, of the horse's gastrointestinal system (the equine gut) from as near a microbial perspective as we can imagine.  These miniscule residents number in the quadrillions (for some perspective, one quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000), so although they're invisible to the naked eye, they have vastly more to do with how the equine gut functions — in health and disease — than you might imagine.

As this book is written for horsepeople who are not scientists, scientists who are not horsepeople, and veterinarians who may be both, some parts of it will no doubt be too basic for you — but hopefully it all comes together and tells a story we can all put to good use.

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Notes

I presented a 2-hour lecture on this topic at the Integrative Veterinary Conferences Australia (IVCA) conference in Melbourne, Australia on 19 October 2024.

Although it is written for a veterinary audience, the proceedings paper is available as a free download (see below).