Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Van Ness, and every week I sit down for a gorgeous

conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, honey, I'm joined by Professor Kelly Arzimudio, where I ask her,

what is the story on frogs?

Well, welcome to Getting Curious, this is Jonathan Van Ness, and I'm so excited about today's topic.

I'm so excited about today's guest without any further ado. Let's jump right in.

Welcome to the show, Kelly Arzimudio, who is a professor in the Department of Integrated Biology

at the University of Texas at Austin, Go Austin, and an endowed fellow of the Dowerty Regions

Chair and Molecular Biology, honey. Her research focuses on the origin and maintenance of

vertebrae biodiversity, especially reptiles and amphibians. How are you, Kelly?

I'm great. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here too.

Me too, because you are a littoral professor and a literal reptile and amphibian expert. I

want to tell you how the origin of this episode came up. Well, we can't be here for six hours,

so I guess I'll just start with the beginning in the end, but there's a lot of frog interest

in the middle. One, poison dart frogs, and I was little. I was like, why are they poisonous? Why do

they have bright colors? One, the most recently, there was this random frog in our backyard,

and then my puppy ran up to it, and then was trying to lick it, and I was like, oh my god,

you're going to like it. Hi, you're going to hallucinate off the toad. So before we go any farther,

is it true that if you lick a frog or a toad or whatever, you get hot?

Well, you don't want to go around licking any frog just randomly because there are

some that could actually hurt you. Frogs and toads depends on the frog, depends on the toad,

they vary in terms of how much they have, but they do have secretions in their skin that they use

...