Frogs eat ants for poisonous protection

Valerie C. Clark of Columbia University has discovered that the poisonous Mantella frogs from Madagascar do not, in fact, contain their own poisons. Insteadthey sequester poisonous alkaloids from a steady diet of alkaloid-rich ants. While such convergent evolution in known in neotropical poison dart frogs fromSouth and Central America, this is the first study to identify the source of alkaloids in Madagascar's frogs.