I recently read that Gary Hebl, a Wisconsin legislator, has nominated the cheese-making bacterium Lactococcus Lactis to be the state microbe. I really like this idea and suggest that ecologists should think about this as a serious development with implications for biodiversity conservation and other ecological issues.
For centuries the scientific community has been in conflict with general society about whether form or function is important in dealing with the natural world. Ben Franklin advocated that the turkey should be the official bird of the USA, but the bald eagle won out and the wild turkey ended up as the symbol of a brand of whiskey. Today's ENGOs focus on cute baby seals and cuddly pandas and there is little public concern for the segmented worms that are essential to most of our ecosystems. (I wrote a paper on this that has been rejected by several journals for its non-scientific language, available at http://bill.silvert.org/pdf/Biodiversity.pdf). If we can generate some degree of public attention for organisms which are important because of what they do rather than how nice they look, then I think we will have made real progress in gaining popular support for meaningful measures to conserve biodiversity. Bill Silvert
