First Venomous Frogs Discovered

“To this point, no one had considered that a frog could be venomous, specifically able to transmit toxin into another animal with a spine or something of that nature”, Brodie said. Well, one day while gathering specimens in the field, that all changed for Brodie and Carlos Jared of Instituto Butantan in São Paulo.

This accident might seem lucky in hindsight, since the species that injured Jared proved to be the less toxic of the two the researchers investigated.

The end result? “Intense ache, radiating up the arm, lasting for 5 hours”, stated research co-author Edmund Brodie, Jr., a herpetologist at Utah State College in Logan.

“There are enlarged and concentrated glands on the nose region and the spines are on the skull and stick out into the upper lip”, Brodie said.

The researchers have learned that a single gram of this frog’s venom could kill up to 80 humans.

Jared was the first to realize that C. greeningi might have a venomous secretion.

“The strength of toxicity of the skin secretions is remarkable, and to say we were surprised by that is an understatement”. Though Corythomantis greeningihas much less poisonous venom, it has bigger head spines and bigger pores and skin glands that secrete extra venom than Aparasphenodon brunoi. “Amphibians have a wide selection of pores and skin toxins which were well-studied, however this kind of mechanism – transmitting the toxin as a venom – has not been discovered earlier than”.

The researchers are saying that this discovery is extremely important for understanding amphibians’ biology and how they deal with predators.

Two species of highly toxic frogs have a bone to prick with their predators. They were known to the scientists for several decades.

The scientists also discovered a related spiny-headed frog called Bruno’s casque-headed frog, known to science as Aparasphenodon brunoi capable of injecting venom 25 times as powerful as that of the pit viper’s. They have unusually flexible necks for frogs, and when grabbed, these amphibians release venom from the skin glands around their spines and flex their heads, jabbing and rubbing their spines into whatever grabbed them.

The findings have been published online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.