Drawing from the need to separate ecologically distinct clades within Escherichia, the authors call more generally for an ecology-based species concept for bacteria. This would address the problem that bacterial systematics has generally recognized species taxa that are enormously broad in their genomes and physiology, sequence diversity, and ecology [18]. Thus, bacterial species do not fulfill one of the central purposes of species taxonomy, to allow us to predict the qualities of an unknown organism based on its classification to a species