Poison Frogs Dress in Hometown Colors

[Frog News]

Livescience.com (Utah, USA) November 21st, 2011 06:46 PM: Poison Frogs Dress in Hometown Colors

The colorful markings of poison dart frogs vary depending on where the frogs live. Now, a new study using thousands of fake-frog decoys finds that these markings evolved hyper-locally, explaining why individuals in a single species of frog can sport so many different colors and patterns.

This local evolution means that yellow stripes would do little to save a poison dart frog from hungry birds in a spot where squiggly green marks signal danger. Predators are more likely to attack strange frogs, not realizing they're toxic. That gives local frogs a hometown advantage.

"When predators see that their targets are of a different species, they attack," study researcher Bernard Angers, a biologist at the University of Montreal, said in a statement. "Over the long term, that explains how patterns and colors become uniform in an area."

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