Every Living Thing

Rob Dunn's Every Living Thing was a fantastic read. It's rare for me to not be able to put down a non-fiction book, but even without knowing a bit of biology, this book fascinated me to the end. It's the story of obsessive, daring biologists challenging the boundaries of what we know, but whose work is often criticized by colleagues, and left unnoticed by everyone else. Here is a passage that I think well-represents the flavor of the book:

He is seventy-eight years old and has tens of thousands of vials to go through and in each there are ants to be checked from head to toe for mites or beetles and back again. For Carl there is solace in the sorting that is yet to be done. He and Marian have spent years sorting, and there is a ritual to it. Marian brings Carl breakfast and he looks through the microscope. He has seen more worlds, looking down through his paired lenses, than astronomers see looking out. In the last few years, Carl and Marian have gone through preserved samples of sixteen hundred army ant colonies, vial by vial, and found forty-five thousand mites. Of those forty-five thousand mites, just three percent have been studied. [. . .] Each new find is more obscure, more particular, more unbelievable. Who knows what lurks among the remaining forty-three thousand mites yet to be examined?

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Related:
The discoveries not yet made (and an interview about the book)
Another State of Things interview with Rob Dunn