Golden Poison Frog: Earth's Most Toxic Animal Steals Its Poison

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The golden poison frog fits in the palm of a hand, weighs about an ounce, and carries enough toxin to kill 10 to 20 people. This episode travels to the Choco rainforest on Colombia's Pacific coast, the only place Phyllobates terribilis lives, in a range of less than 5,000 square kilometers. A single wild adult holds roughly one milligram of batrachotoxin, which jams open the sodium channels of nerve cells so that muscles, including the heart, contract and cannot release. The frog advertises the danger in bright yellow, orange, or mint green, and survives its own chemistry with a protein that soaks up the toxin like a sponge and carries it safely to the skin.

The strangest fact is that the frog makes none of this poison itself. It harvests the toxin from small beetles in its diet, and frogs raised in captivity on fruit flies and crickets are completely harmless. That detail turned out to matter for more than biology. When poaching for the pet trade pushed the species toward collapse, a Colombian breeding program used harmless captive frogs to undercut the black market.

• Juveniles start out black with two golden stripes and take about 18 weeks to develop full adult warning colors.
• Embera and Cofan hunters heat a captured frog until it sweats toxin, then roll blowgun darts in the fluid. A dart can stay lethal for more than two years.
• After the eggs hatch, tadpoles stick to a parent's back and are carried up into the canopy to pools of rainwater held in bromeliads.
• One snake in the same forest has evolved resistance to the toxin and regularly preys on juvenile frogs.
• Tesoros de Colombia flooded the pet market with legal, non-toxic captive-bred frogs, and the IUCN now rates the illegal trade threat to the species as small.