In some videos whether it be Instagram, YouTube or TikTok, there are videos of people touching poison dart frogs even though touching them is dangerous. So do they survive afterwords and if they do how?
In: Biology
newsflash: Poison dart frogs by themselves are not venomous. The venomous toxin that they secrete from their skin comes from their diet. in their natural habitat, they eat venomous ants in great quantities. the venom builds up in their metabolism and then gets secreted through their skin. There are quite a few people around the world that like to keep Poison Dart frogs as pets. In these cases, they are completely harmless, as they are not eating the venomous ants while in captivity. I actually knew a guy who was really into dart frogs and even got into breeding them. They are very colorful and make some cool noises. Not for me personally, but he was really into them.
Most poison dart frogs are considered toxic and not always deadly. Touching a poison dart frog can cause serious swelling, nausea, and muscular paralysis without leading to death. Still, don’t go touching one because you saw someone else do it and they survived.
For starters – poison dart frogs in captivity are virtually free of toxins. They get their toxins from their diet in the wild, so if you have one as a pet it is safer to handle than using hand sanitizer.
But even wild ones are not “touch it and you die” toxic. Only one species, Phyllobates terribilis, is *acutely* toxic, and touching it will just make your skin burn. Of course, if you have a cut, or then go on to lick your skin, it would cause worse symptoms, but very likely not deadly in an adult.
Other species of poison dart frog have somewhere between 2% and 10% of the toxin of Phyllobates terribilis and aren’t considered deadly to humans unless you eat a few of them.
they are basically like fish. They concentrate toxins found in their diet.
Eating a fish from the ocean will give you your daily maximum dose of mercury, and touching a poison dart frog in it’s natural habitat will be very unpleasant and sometimes deadly.
If the frog is poisonous you’d have to lick it or have a sharp object that was rubbed on the frog penetrate your skin. The frog might not be poisonous if it didn’t eat poisonous insects, they don’t produce poison, they get it from their food.
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