(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Top Comments: The Evolution of Poisonous Frogs. [1]

['View Profile', 'Back Of Bourke']

Date: 2026-04-19  

Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site’s best, funniest, most mojo’d & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the internal DK messaging account topcomments by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!

It is well known that, in tropical places, there are frogs with poisonous skin. This is clearly a survival strategy for the protection of creatures that would otherwise be extremely vulnerable to predation. The poisons are sufficiently powerful that, in the Amazon Forest and parts of Central America, indigenous tribes have collected poison from such frogs to tip their arrows for the purpose of hunting.

How did these frogs become so poisonous? How did this survival strategy evolve? Such an extreme system could not have sprung up from nowhere. A new study sheds light on how the toxicity of these frogs came about.

It turns out that the source of the frogs’ poison comes from their diets, consisting of particular ants, mites, millipedes and beetles. These arthropods generate poisons of their own as protection. In order to withstand the effects of the toxic substances they were consuming, the frogs developed a process called sequestration, where the frogs isolate and store these poisons. As it happens, among related frog species, there are a variety of abilities to sequester toxins, as well as how effectively such toxins are transported to their skin. The researchers performed experiments on three different species of frog that demonstrate sequestration.

“We selected one tree frog (Dryophytes cinereus) from the family Hylidae, which is phylogenetically distant from poison frogs and was not expected to sequester alkaloids,” explained Jeckel. “We also selected one species (Allobates femoralis) from the Aromobatidae family, a sister family of poison frogs. Finally, we selected several poison frogs from the family Dendrobatidae. We fed them different alkaloids and quantified the total amount sequestered in their skin.”

Through careful dosing of toxins of these three different species of frogs, the researchers discovered that all three species had some capacity for sequestration, but that this capacity increased as the frog itself became more poisonous.

Interestingly, the researchers found that non-toxic frogs stored small amounts of alkaloids, frogs with a medium toxicity stored more, and poison frogs stored high levels of toxins. These results suggest that sequestration evolved gradually in frogs and did not appear suddenly in new frog species. “Our paper establishes a foundation for understanding alkaloid sequestration and resistance mechanisms in poison frogs,” said Jeckel. “We have shown that closely related species may have an intermediate form of the sequestration mechanism, making them a promising group for studying these mechanisms alongside sequestering species. Additionally, we have demonstrated that the ability to modify alkaloids is unique to sequestering species and may represent an important step in the evolution of sequestration.”

Clearly, poisonous frogs did not just come out of nowhere, and there is now evidence of where it came from. Additionally, the frogs that became poisonous also evolved the ability to modify the toxins they ingest and sequester.

On to the Comments:

From your humble diarist:

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/19/800023790/community/top-comments-the-evolution-of-poisonous-frogs/

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/