The 10 snakes faced a tough predicament.

Collected from the Colombian Amazon, they had been without food for several days in captivity and then were presented with extremely unappetizing prey: three-striped poison dart frogs, .

The skin of those frogs contains deadly toxins – such as histrionicotoxins, pumiliotoxins, and decahydroquinolines – that interfere with essential cell proteins.

Six of the royal ground snakes ( ) preferred to go hungry. The other four intrepidly slithered in for the kill.

But before swallowing their meals, they dragged the frogs across the ground – akin to the way some birds rub toxins off their prey, noted biologist Valeria Ramírez Castañeda of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues, who conducted the experiment.

Three of the four snakes

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