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Army Sent to Fight Millions of Invading Toxic Toads
Reporter writes "The Australian state government called for the army to be deployed against the invasion of toxic toads! Battalions of imported cane toads are marching relentlessly across northern Australia and the West Australian government wants soldiers to intercept the environmental barbarians. From the article: "The toads, Bufo Marinus, were introduced from South America into northeast Queensland state in the 1930s to control another pest: Beetles that were ravaging the sugar cane fields of the tropical northern coasts. But the toads now number in the millions and are spreading westward through the Northern Territory, upsetting the country's ecosystem in their wake. Cane toads have poisonous sacs on the back of their heads full of a venom so powerful it can kill crocodiles, snakes or other predators in minutes." More information about cane toads at Wikipedia."
While that seems to be a good idea, look what happened in the Southern US when this plan was introduced. Since it was non-native and had no natural _predators_ it grew widely. It is now considered a pest itself and is causing damage to the local ecology. Unfortunately, this is another example of why introducing a non-native species to solve a pest just creates a vicious circle. See Wikipedia article on Kudzu.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Didn't they already do that? Oh wait, I'm thinking of something else:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079501/
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Then, along comes some fool who makes a 15-minute observation of two locales. He sees a "pest" that he does not like in locale #1. He sees a predator in locale #2 and observes that the predator can kill the "pest". So, he then injects the predator into locale #1.
What the fool fails to recognize is that the predator is part of an entire eco-system in locale #2. Unless, he injects that entire eco-system into locale #1, the predator might either die or multiply uncontrollably.
Why doesn't the fool realize that his 15 minutes of observation cannot possibly match the millions of years of experimentation (i.e., evolution) that nature has already conducted to create an optimum eco-system?
The bottom line is that the most dangerous predator on this planet is a moron and that this predator itself has no other natural predator to keep the moron in check. Who is the moron? Homo sapiens.