“…We were surprised/intrigued at the similarity of the gut microbiota of A. striata reared in guava and A. ludens reared in bitter orange, when this similarity would have been expected in the cases of A. striata and A. fraterculus, both attacking guava in nature (A. ludens and A. striata do not share a single host in nature). It is known that when a fruit fly larva develops in guavas, particularly in unripe fruit, it is exposed to high concentrations of secondary metabolites (Gull et al, 2012;Dos Santos et al, 2017;Monribot-Villanueva et al, 2022), especially tannins and other polyphenols, many of them toxic to the larvae (Lee et al, 2010;Birke et al, 2015;Birke and Aluja, 2018). In this sense, while A. striata prefers to oviposit into totally unripe fruit (Birke et al, 2015) that has still not reached full development (stage four or "player marble size"), A. fraterculus prefers stages five or six, green but fully developed and ripe "turning yellow" stages, respectively (Birke et al, 2015;De Oliveira et al, 2015).…”