ABSTRACT
Insects are the most successful organisms on Earth; part of this success is due to their ability to feed on a wide variety of diets (Ishikawa 2003). Many of these foods have nutritional deficiencies that, in part, are supplied by microorganisms (Tamas et al. 2002). Therefore, microorganisms affected the development and survival of insects during millions of years of evolution, either being a direct food source or providing new metabolic pathways, which allowed the spread of these organisms (Berenbaum 1988; Wernegreen 2004; Schultz et al. 2005).
