Researchers find 2 frogs actually venomous

Brazilian species previously had been classified poisonous

Venomous frogs are a thing now, apparently.

While poisonous frogs are quite common, venomous frogs were unrecognized by science until just now.

Venom and poison might get used interchangeably, but there’s one major difference: Poison is absorbed through the skin or eaten. Venom is injected. Pufferfish are poisonous, vipers are venomous.

So yeah, there aren’t just poisonous frogs out there that secrete toxins from special glands. There are frogs that inject venom into things.

Sweet dreams, everyone. Previously incognito

The two venomous frog species from Brazil are described in a study published Thursday in Current Biology. Corythomantis

greeningi and Aparasphenodon brunoi aren’t newly discovered species, but until now they’ve been going incognito vis-a-vis the whole venom injection thing.

Their means of injection are bony spines on their heads, which were discovered when Carlos Jared of Instituto Butan- tan in São Paulo got stuck with one. After five hours of intense, radiating pain, he figured the spines were worth looking into.

It turns out Jared was quite lucky: He got the venom of C.

greeningi, which is actually much less potent than the other frog being studied. A. brunoi could kill 80 humans with a single gram of its venom. ‘Very small amounts’

Not to worry, though: A gram of toxin sounds like a tiny amount, but it’s way more than a human would be exposed to during one prick of a frog’s spine.

“It is unlikely that a frog of this species produces this much toxin, and only very small amounts would be transferred by the spines into a wound,” fellow study author Edmund Brodie of Utah State University said in a statement. “Regardless, we have been unwilling to test this by allowing a frog to jab us with its spines.”

According to Brodie and Jared, there may be many more venomous frogs masquerading as merely poisonous.

Courtesy Carlos Jared / Butantan Institute Aparasphenodon brunoi (Bruno’s Casque-headed Frog), is one of the first frogs found to inject venom. A single gram of this frog’s venom, which is injected into a predator by way of bony spine on its head, can kill 80 humans. But a single sting would...