Containment is tougher for backboned animals like ourselves. We have to control a far larger consortium of microbes than any insect, and we have to do it without bacteriocytes. Most of our microbes live around our cells, not inside them. Just think about your gut. It’s a long and heavily folded tube that, if spread out fully, would cover the surface of a football field. Swarming within that tube are trillions of bacteria. There’s just one layer of epithelial cells – the ones that line our organs – stopping them from penetrating the walls of the gut and reaching the blood vessels that could
...more
epithelium
