Baofa Yin

1 Introduction Predation is one of the most significant selective pressures shaping the behavior and physiology of prey species (Clinchy et al. 2013; Zanette and Clinchy 2019). In the wild, predator cues such as odors (Chen et al. 2022; Gorrell et al. 2020; Yin et al. 2011), sounds (MacLean and Bonter 2013; Monarca et al. 2015), and visual signals (Hemmi 2005; Steindler et al. 2020) elicit immediate defensive responses, enabling prey to mitigate risks and enhance survival.

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1 INTRODUCTION Microbes are considered an integral animal phenotype component (Holmes & Nicholson, 2005), exerting an influence on the fitness and consequently on the ecologically significant traits of their hosts (Greene et al., 2020; Groussin et al., 2017; McFall-Ngai et al., 2013).