bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.13.947432; this version posted February 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 Formicine ants swallow their highly acidic poison for gut microbial selection and control 2 Simon Tragust1†*, Claudia Herrmann1, Jane Häfner1, Ronja Braasch1, Christina Tilgen1, Maria 3 Hoock1, Margarita Artemis Milidakis1, Roy Gross2, Heike Feldhaar1 4 5 1 Animal Ecology I, Bayreuth Center for Ecology and Environmental Research (BayCEER), 6 University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstraße 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany 7 2 Microbiology, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg 8 † Present address: General Zoology, Hoher Weg 8, Martin-Luther University, 06120 Halle 9 (Saale), Germany 10 * Correspondence to:
[email protected] 11 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.13.947432; this version posted February 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 12 Abstract 13 Animals continuously encounter microorganisms that are essential for health or cause disease. 14 They are thus challenged to control harmful microbes while allowing acquisition of beneficial 15 microbes, a challenge that is likely especially important concerning microbes in food and in 16 animals such as social insects that exchange food among colony members.