Does survival of the fittest not apply to frogs?
Well, it probably does over time but the story turns out to be more complex than that. In one study, the brighter colored poison frogs were not necessarily outcompeting the blander colored ones for survival. Also, from ScienceDaily:
“The biggest surprise came from the fact that the frogs [with] higher amount of toxins in their skin are not necessarily the ones that birds find most distasteful. This finding challenges previous assumptions that most toxic equals most unpalatable,” says Rojas. Paper.(open access) – Lawrence, Rojas, Fouquet, Mappes, Blanchette, Saporito, Bosque, Courtois and Noonan. Weak warning signals can persist in the absence of gene flow. PNAS, 2019 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1901872116 More.
Maybe we are looking for a certainty that isn’t there. How much toxin a frog has may not be calibrated by nature “daily, hourly, adding up.”
See also: Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?
Follow UD News at Twitter!