During 400 million years of existence, insects have rarely succumbed to the evolution of microbial resistance against their potent antimicrobial immune defenses. We found that microbial clearance after infection is extremely fast and that induced antimicrobial activity starts to increase only when most of the bacteria (99.5%) have been removed. Our experiments showed that those bacteria that survived exposure to the insect's constitutive immune response were subsequently more resistant to it. These results imply that induced antimicrobial compounds function primarily to protect the insect against the bacteria that persist within their body, rather than to clear microbial infections. These findings suggest that understanding of the management of antimicrobial peptides in natural systems might inform medical treatment strategies that avoid the risk of drug resistance.
Despite the fact that all vertically transmitted symbionts sequester resources from their hosts and are therefore costly to maintain, there is an extraordinary diversity of them in invertebrates. Some spread through host populations by providing their hosts with fitness benefits or by manipulating host sex ratio, but some do not: their maintenance in host lineages remains an enigma. In this review, I explore the evolutionary ecology of vertically transmitted symbionts and their impact on host resistance, and provide an overview of the evidence for the three-way interactions between these symbionts, natural enemies and invertebrate hosts. A number of recent empirical and theoretical studies suggest that vertically transmitted symbionts may protect their hosts from pathogens. If this 'symbiont-mediated protection' is widespread, it is likely that vertically transmitted symbionts contribute significantly to variation in measures of invertebrate resistance to natural enemies.
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