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
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.
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