Here’s why poisonous animals don’t poison themselves

Here’s why poisonous animals don’t poison themselves.
In the forests of New Guinea lives a small, drab bird with a deadly secret.
It’s called the hooded pitohui, and its orange and black feathers are laced with poison.
Simply touching the feathers of a pitohui is enough to make your hands feel like they’re on fire.
But ingest a bit of the batrachotoxin, called BTX for short, and the poison stops your sodium channels from working, leading to paralysis and even death.
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“You can think about these poisons as kind of a natural drug.
It’s something that the animals use to protect themselves, because it… either gives a very unpleasant feeling to the thing that’s trying to eat them, or in the worst case, it kills the thing that’s trying to eat them,” says Daniel Minor, a biophysicist at University of California, San Francisco’s Cardiovascular Research Institute.