Emberá people of western Colombia rub the tips of blowgun darts across the back of a living Phyllobates terribilis, which secretes batrachotoxin through its skin when handled. The coated darts stay effective for a long period. This is the origin of the family name, and it belongs to a small number of species rather than to dendrobatids as a group.
Batrachotoxin binds to voltage-gated sodium channels and holds them open, so nerve and muscle cells cannot repolarise. The dose in a single wild frog is often quoted as enough to kill several adult humans, though the figures in circulation are extrapolations from rodent toxicity rather than direct measurement.
As with other dendrobatids, the toxin is dietary. Captive-bred golden poison frogs raised on crickets and fruit flies carry no batrachotoxin at all, which is why zoos display them in open-topped enclosures. The precise wild prey supplying the alkaloid has not been fully identified, though small beetles are the leading candidate.