In the year 1825, deep in the rough, humid rainforest of Columbia, Captain Charles Stuart Cochrane of the British Navy witnesses a strange event.

The systematic imprisonment and deliberate torture of tiny golden frogs.

The Embara people, indigenous to the area, are performing a task completely inexplicable,

if you don't know their end goal.

Each frog in their possession is hardly two inches long, and yet all of them are kept in a

carefully constructed miniature wooden prison, where they are fed as they await their turn.

The torturers select an unfortunate creature, a young male frog, and, horrifyingly, they spear the frog down his throat and out through his leg.

Cochrane writes, quote,

This torture makes the poor frog perspire very much, especially on his back, which becomes covered with white froth. This is the most

powerful poison that he yields." End quote. Indeed, it might be the most powerful poison in the

natural world. Cochrane knows what they are doing. They are deliberately eliciting a fear response in the

small creature so they can take his poison and use it to kill. They dip darts into the poison and

store them. From this animal, they produce 50 poison darts, each lethal and each usable for months after.

Many poison dart frogs are deadly, but the one featured in this true story from the 1800s, this one, is 20 times more deadly than the second most deadly one.

This episode is about the golden poison frog.

Philobates, Terribillus.

I'm Mackin. This is Species.

Welcome to the show.

Today we're going to talk about how this animal lives,

and then we're going to talk about how this animal kills.

Oh, and at the end, I'll talk about why this animal is a safer pet than your dog.

Seriously.

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