Fig. 1: Lethal effects and diversity of soil pathogens.

a Relative 16 S rRNA gene copies (bacterial load ΔCq) for individuals whose wounds were exposed to a sterile PBS solution (blue: Sterile), or soil pathogens diluted in PBS (red: Infected, OD = 0.1), 2 and 11 h after exposure (n = 10 per boxplot, see Supplementary Table 1 for statistical results). Significant differences (P < 0.05) are shown with different letters and were calculated using a two-sided least square means with Holm-Bonferroni correction. b Absolute 16 S rRNA gene copy numbers summarized at the genus-level for the 18 amplicon sequence variants (ASV) that had at least 1% relative abundance in five of the 40 analyzed ants across the experiment (n = 10 per boxplot). Significance is shown for pairwise comparisons between sterile (blue) and infected ants (red): ***=P < 0.001; **=P < 0.01; *=P < 0.05; n.s.= not significant (P > 0.05). Detailed statistical results in Supplementary Table 2, significant differences were calculated with a two-sided permutation t-test with Holm-Bonferroni correction. (c) Kaplan – Meier cumulative survival rates of workers in isolation (dotted line) or inside the nest (solid line) whose wounds were exposed to a sterile PBS solution (blue: sterile), or soil pathogens diluted in PBS (red: infected, OD = 0.1). Significant differences (P < 0.05) are indicated with different letters. Detailed statistical results in Supplementary Fig. 2a and Supplementary Table 3, significant differences were calculated using a two-sided least square means with Holm-Bonferroni correction. Boxplots show median (horizontal line), interquartile range (box), distance from upper and lower quartiles times 1.5 inter-quartile range (whiskers), outliers (>1.5x upper or lower quartile). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.