Studying poison frog evolution

Interested in how changes at the DNA level translate to changes in any feature of an organism and how this influences the evolutionary process. We tackle these questions studying how what we believe were these brown dull colored frogs became colorful and toxic. The specific poison frogs we study are called poison dart frogs and they're famous for being one of the most poisonous animals in the world. They are incredibly toxic yet seem to be unaffected by their toxins, and this means they must have evolved to both be able to accumulate these very powerful toxins and resist them. And also, after studying them for some time, it became evident that they have actually evolved bright colorations multiple times very quickly. It has happened three times that these dull colored and not toxic frogs have become colorful and toxic. This gives us replicated instances in the same thing. That is as close as you're going to get to an actual experiment when studying evolution. So as a scientist, when this is your job, you also have to think about not only what you're interested in, but how this impacts society, right? Poison frog toxicity is perhaps my favorite example of how just studying the evolution of these animals can inform medicine or pharmacology. These frogs cannot make their own toxins, they need to eat them, and then they accumulate them and then they keep them in their body, which is very similar to what humans do when we are looking for natural products too drugs. There it is very important to have a balance where the positives outweigh the negatives. Opioids, for example, are excellent painkillers, but they're also addictive. Understanding how poison frogs can just have a lot of alkaloids in their system and seemingly just entirely avoid their negative effects can teach us a lot about how an animal, specifically a vertebrate, can interact with these molecules more safely, which could later inform how we design drugs.