UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI) researchers and colleagues on the East Coast have for the first time quantified the number of bacteria in the guts of a broad range of ant species in the Amazon rainforest. They found that the primarily herbivorous ants that live in the canopy have orders of magnitude more bacteria than those that live on the ground. The work has implications for the way microbiome studies are conducted. The authors published the study July 27 in Integrative and Comparative Biology.