Solarte Oophaga pumilio

Oophaga pumilio, the strawberry poison frog, is red throughtout its continental distribution in Central America. This is an aposematic signal to warn its potential predators of its toxicity. However there is a province in Panama called Bocas del Toro, composed mainly of islands, where there is a lot of phenotypic variation. Several islands have their own color morph (yellow, green, orange, red, blue, etc). We wanted to address how different evolutionary forces may be acting on this polymorphism and what is genetic basis of this polymorphism. We found several genes with strong signals of selection responsible for the color shifts. TTc39b is a gene invoved in the pathway that converts diertary yellow carotenoid into red, we found a distinct haplotype of these genes in yellow and red frogs. When comparing red to blue frogs, we found an increase of melanosomes in blue frogs and non-synonymous mutations in the gene kit, which is a gene known to be involved in melanogenesis. Our preprint is now available