Baseline American Toad Bufadienolide Concentrations

Parotoid secretions were collected on pre-weighed filter paper after manual expression by compressing each gland between two fingers. Following an initial sampling, toads were randomly assigned to one of three expression-frequency treatments (N = 42)—frequent expression (5x), medium expression (1x), or low expression (0x)—and sampled over five months. At the experiment’s conclusion, toad glands were expressed one final time for comparison, followed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) of the secretions. Here we compare the baseline chemotypes to the final chemotypes among treatments.