Colorful poison Frog

For about 50 years researchers have painful poison frogs and ground up the tissue to learn its chemistry. The practice, however, was listening carefully almost entirely on extracting the toxins, which can have pharmaceutical application.

"Skinning [was] a normal practice, but in the previous couple of decades, improvements in technology have skyrocketed”. Our compassion to detect and analyze compounds is much better, so we can do a lot more with a lot less."

For frogs of the Mantella genus of Madagascar, the machine helped isolate bile acids and sugars never before seen on frog skins