"O. pumilio" can also attribute its cutaneous toxicity to its rich diet of formicinae ants. Species of the formicine genus "Brachymyrmex" contain pumiliotoxins which the frogs incorporate and accumulate poison from. There is a variability of alkaloid profiles among populations and individuals of "O. pumilio", which is indicative of varying levels of available prey within their infraspecific habitats. Research and physical analysis reveal that maternally derived alkaloids exist in young tadpoles. The increase in alkaloids in tadpoles suggests that the females are providing more chemical defenses to their more vulnerable young. This being one of the first found examples of provisioning that occurs after hatching. During tadpole-rearing, mother frogs feed their young an unfertilized egg from their ovaries after dropping each individual tadpole into a repository of water usually found in a bromeliad. Tadpoles lacking the obligate nutritive egg diet do not contain the alkaloid. This step is crucial for the tadpoles to sequester the alkaloid from their mother; without such, young tadpoles become susceptible to predation by arthropods and other frogs.