Basically the title. I once saw a documentation and one zoologist said that posion dart frogs loose their poison when kept in a zoo for example. Why is that?
In: Biology
The poison that they make comes from their diet. There are certain insects they eat in the wild that somehow make them poisonous. In captivity, they are fed a different diet, and therefore are no longer able to make poison.
Most (maybe all?) poison dart frogs get the poison because of their diet. Raising one domestically changes the diet so that they can’t produce the poison.
Nobody is actually 100% sure. As others have mentioned it is because of their diet but feeding them the exact same things in captivity still makes them poison free. It appears that the vegetation or some other environmental condition affects the insects that the frog eats which in turn affects the frog. It’s a classic example of how important a fully intact eco-system is to many animals. It’s also not possible to grow Brazil nuts outside of the rainforest. For years they didn’t know exactly why here either but they have now at least found the answer to this one. Eating Brazil nuts helps preserve the Amazon!
Ooh I know this one. There’s a zoo (The Discovery Center zoo?) a half an hour away from my house that has poison dart frogs of all different colors. Anyways, the signs and our tour guide explained that the type of ant they eat in their natural habitat caused them to be poisonous. So when they’re held in captivity, they become not poisonous because they’re not eating what makes them poisonous anymore. The ants are called “formicine ants” which carry a toxins in a group called lipophilic alkaloids (which is a broad term for different types of toxins). The toxins are stored in the skin, but I am not sure on how when transferred to captivity if the toxin just is filtered out of the frog or if it stays until it is used as a defense, or if it has to be removed. After captivity, if the frogs continue eating the ants, they can become poisonous once again.
I’ll attach a link to the article I found to get the exact name of the ants, which also has other cool info.[Poison Dart Frogs](https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/frogs-get-poison-ants)
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