Consuming your colors: carotenoid and retinol availability affects expression of color related genes in the mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator)
Andrew O. Rubio, Mallory de Araujo Miles, Ashley M. Dye, Adam M. M. Stuckert, Kyle Summers · 2025
Read Consuming your colors: carotenoid and retinol availability affects expression of color related genes in the mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) by Andrew O. Rubio, Mallory de Araujo Miles, Ashley M. Dye, Adam M. M. Stuckert, Kyle Summers (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12715915.txt.
Description
Andrew Rubio, Mallory de Araujo Miles, Ashley Dye, and a wider team wrote this research paper, published in 2025. It asks how the color pigments in a poison frog's diet switch on the genes that build its bright warning colors.
The mimic poison frog comes in bold color forms, including an orange-banded form and a red-headed one. Young frogs were raised on diets rich or poor in carotenoids and retinol, the raw materials of color and vision chemistry. Well-fed froglets turned up genes in the retinol handling pathway. Froglets on the poor diet instead raised genes from a related acid pathway. The results show diet reaching directly into gene control of pigmentation. The authors say the work fills a gap in how warning-colored animals turn food into the signals that keep predators away.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Andrew O. Rubio, Mallory de Araujo Miles, Ashley M. Dye, Adam M. M. Stuckert, Kyle Summers |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 52 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |