What put the poison in frogs?
Birds did it After more than a decade of work, California researchers think they have solved the 40-year-old mystery of where poisonous South American frogs get their deadly neurotoxin – and surprisingly, the lead came from birds in New Guinea. The poison has been used for centuries by indigenous Colombians to coat the points of their tiny blow darts, allowing them to bring down large prey – as well as humans – with relative ease. Called batrachotoxin, the lethal agent is more powerful than curare and 10 times as deadly as the tetrodotoxin from the puffer fish. Simply handling the frogs that secrete it from their skin can be fatal. The discovery is of more-than-academic interest because batrachotoxin – from the Greek “batrachos,” or frog – is widely used in studying the function of sodium channels, gates in the cellular membrane that are implicated in a variety of diseases, such as multiple sclerosis.
