Seasonal changes in diet and toxicity in the Climbing Mantella frog (Mantella laevigata)

Poison frogs acquire chemical defenses from the environment for protection against potential predators. These defensive chemicals are lipophilic alkaloid toxins that are sequestered by poison frogs from dietary arthropods and stored in skin glands. Despite decades of research focusing on identifying poison frog toxins, we know relatively little about how environmental variation and subsequent arthropod availability impacts toxicity in poison frogs. We investigated how seasonal environmental variation influences poison frog toxin 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 temperature and rainfall are associated with changes in the diet and skin toxin profiles of M. laevigata. The arthropod diet of each frog was characterized into five groups (i.e. ants, termites, mites, larvae and ...