ArticleBiology letters2014
Maternally derived chemical defences are an effective deterrent against some predators of poison frog tadpoles (Oophaga pumilio).
Article in Biology letters, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Premetamorphic Development of the Phytotelm-Dwelling Toad Dendrophryniscus lauroi (Anura: Bufonidae).Journal of morphology · 2026Article
- Animal medical systems from Apis to apes: history, recent advances and future perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- No evidence of quantitative honest signaling in aposematic traits of the green and black dendrobatid frogCurrent zoology · 2025Article
- Paternal care plasticity: males care more for early- than late-developing embryos in an arboreal breeding treefrog.Frontiers in zoology · 2024Article
- What Amphibians Can Teach Us About the Evolution of Parental Care.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2023Article
- How Phylogenetics Can Elucidate the Chemical Ecology of Poison Frogs and Their Arthropod Prey.Journal of chemical ecology · 2022Article
- Frank Beach Award Winner: Lessons from poison frogs on ecological drivers of behavioral diversification.Hormones and behavior · 2020Review
- Developments in Amphibian Parental Care Research: History, Present Advances, and Future Perspectives.Herpetological monograph · 2020Article
- Genomic Takeover by Transposable Elements in the Strawberry Poison Frog.Molecular biology and evolution · 2018Article
- Variable Alkaloid Defenses in the Dendrobatid Poison Frog Oophaga pumilio are Perceived as Differences in Palatability to Arthropods.Journal of chemical ecology · 2017Article
- The relationship between poison frog chemical defenses and age, body size, and sex.Frontiers in zoology · 2015Article
- Maternal care shapes an aposematic display and provides lifelong protection against predators.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Brood-partitioning behaviour in unpredictable environments: hedging the bets?Behavioral ecology and sociobiologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Parents defend their young in many ways, including provisioning chemical defences. Recent work in a poison frog system offers the first example of an animal that provisions its young with alkaloids after hatching or birth rather than before. But it is not yet known whether maternally derived alkaloids are an effective defence against offspring predators. We identified the predators of Oophaga pumilio tadpoles and conducted laboratory and field choice tests to determine whether predators are deterred by alkaloids in tadpoles. We found that snakes, spiders and beetle larvae are common predators of O. pumilio tadpoles. Snakes were not deterred by alkaloids in tadpoles. However, spiders were less likely to consume mother-fed O. pumilio tadpoles than either alkaloid-free tadpoles of the red-eyed treefrog, Agalychnis callidryas, or alkaloid-free O. pumilio tadpoles that had been hand-fed with A. callidryas eggs. Thus, maternally derived alkaloids reduce the risk of predation for tadpoles, but only against some predators.
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