The most poisonous animal on Earth is the Golden Poison Dart Frog.

If you asked most people what the most poisonous animal, you’d probably get an answer of some kind of snake or spider; not a bright yellow, 5cm long frog!  Well they might look cute but one of these crazy little frogs could kill you with a long distance fart!

What the Fact?

The Terribilis isn’t always necessarily golden as it’s English name suggests. They can be mint green, orange or yellow but I think it’s safe to say, if you come across anything that even remotely looks like one you should run like hell.  Saying that, you’re unlikely to encounter one of these little badgers unless you’re 100-200 metres up in the heart of a rain-forest,..so you should be safe.

The reason their poison is so toxic is apparently down to their diets.  When you take one from the wild (yeah right!) and keep it captive, it slowly loses it’s toxicity and could, I guess, be handled safely.

In the wild though, these are not frogs with which whom who you should mess unless you’re one of those completely insane tribes-people who use the frog’s poison secreting skin glands to coat their arrow tips.  In Columbia for example, the Emberá people hold the frog over a fire so it’s skin excretes some of the poison which is caught in a container and used to coat the arrow tips.

Mine is the One that Says ‘Bad Mother-Frogger’.

The poison of the Terribilis is an alkaloid poison called batrachotoxin and works by causing muscle tissue to contract which eventually causes heart failure.  A single frog contains around one milligram of the poison on average.  That’s about enough to kill 10,000 mice, 10-20 humans or a couple of African bull elephants.   In fact, if you do the math, it works out that just one gram of the toxin is enough to kill 15,000 humans!  Dogs and chickens have even been known to be killed by touching paper towels that the Terribilis has walked on.

But They’re Not All Bad…

Scientists have been able to use the poison to develop new kinds of anti-toxins and have say they may even be able to create a new type of  painkiller. A painkiller, so they say, that could be more effective than morphine but without any of the addictive and narcotic qualities.