Seasonal changes in diet and chemical defense in the Climbing Mantella frog (Mantella laevigata).

ABSTRACT: Poison frogs acquire chemical defenses from the environment for protection against potential predators. These defensive chemicals are lipophilic alkaloids that are sequestered by poison frogs from dietary arthropods and stored in skin glands. Despite decades of research focusing on identifying poison frog alkaloids, we know relatively little about how environmental variation and subsequent arthropod availability impacts alkaloid loads in poison frogs. We investigated how seasonal environmental variation influences poison frog chemical profiles through changes in the diet of the Climbing Mantella (Mantella laevigata). We collected M. laevigata females on the Nosy Mangabe island reserve in Madagascar during the wet and dry seasons and tested the hypothesis that seasonal differences in rainfa

SUBMITTER: Moskowitz NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6306172 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature