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Toxic Toads Taking Over Australia
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo News is reporting that toxic toads imported from Hawaii to help control the beetle population that was ravaging Australia's sugar cane crops have instead become pests themselves. From the article: 'The toads can grow as large as dinner plates and weigh up to 4.5 pounds. Their heads and backsides are studded with rows of warts that secrete a milky white toxin called bufotoxin. Because Australia has no native toads, many native predators such as snakes, lizards and mammals are very sensitive to the toxin. So when the toads spread, they immediately kill off many of the region's top predators.'"
I haven't RTFA yet, but this isn't exactly news Down Here--Cane toads have been pests for years, at least in the tropical north.
The big news is that they are {evolving|being noodly appendaged} to be able to travel further (they're spreading at a rate of up to 60 km/year as opposed to 10 km/yr when they were introduced) and they are adapting to colder climates.
Apart from their utility in practicing my golf swing, this is quite scary stuff for those of us here in the south.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Probably because the local flora and fauna that has been seperated from the rest of the world for so long that it can't compete with every critter/plant that some moron brings in from somewhere else. Though there are certainly plenty of other critters introduced elsewhere that cause problems like this.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Last I'd heard nothing was eating these toads.
Nothing that is except a small population of Ravens that learned that if you flip the toads over, the bellys have no poison. As soon as one figured this out, others started to copy the behavior. Now ravens are disembowling these toads all over the place.
Now that is cool.
The Hawaiian islands gets hit almost as badly as Australia. Sometimes it's accidental introduction -- there's a frog species overrunning some areas and causing serious noise pollution with their croaking -- and sometimes it's deliberate but misguided. People introduced the mongoose to control the rat population. Not only did they not take care of the rats (they forgot to take into account different nesting habits and day/night cycle), but they proceeded to infest the islands themselves.
Like Australia, Hawaii is geographically isolated. Species thrive without competition, but when a more competitive species arrives, it has an easy time taking over.
On the other hand, Australia has been isolated for a lot longer than Hawaii has existed, so while Hawaii is populated by successive waves of immigrating species going back thousands of years, Australia's got millions of years' worth of native species that haven't had to deal much with foreigners until a few hundred years ago.
The damn cane toads are always in the news here.
The current huge argument is over whether it is human to beat them to death with Golf clubs.
Seriously, a NT minister suggested that golf clubs worked great, and lots of animal liberationists lost it, and suggested the only humane way was to put something on their back (can't remember what, put them in a plastic bag and then freeze them to death.
Hello people, this Toad is destroying our Native wildlife and you are worried about cruelty ????
lounge around on the blue couch
Wouldn't it be a good idea to encode genetic weaknesses into creatures you are going to spread in such an environment, so that you can get rid of them in case they cause too much trouble?
I am not sure about the exact implementation of this, but perhaps reducing resistability to some otherwise harmless disease, or increasing sensitivity to a type of poison...
Any biology experts to comment on the idea?
The toads to first colonise an area will of course be the fittest, fastest toads; these are individuals that have eaten the most, grown the best, and able to move longer distances more quickly in search of new feeding areas. The motivation to move comes from competition in existing areas, and an abundance of "resources" (ie. food, space) in uncolonised areas. Less fit competitors take longer to move into new feeding areas because they are less able to do so. As far as the toads in the "older" established populations in Queensland go, they reached carrying capacity in the environment decades ago so there are no new areas to colonise, no abudant resources to lead to monsterous toads, and generally a much smaller average size given their short generation time.
I have not read Ben's paper yet so I'm not sure whether the claims of evolution are simply media spin, but I know enough about toad population dynamics (I research toad impacts on native species) to question the assumptions made in TFA. Without knowing more about the research, the conclusions seem to be explainable through standard population models.