Daily MOS: Australia’s Toxic Asshole Death Toads

Do you remember the story ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’? Pretty sure that was actually a metaphor about Australia’s attempt to balance its ecosystem. Oh, you brought 30-50 feral hogs to Australia? Soon you’re gonna be at war with feral cats, dromedary camels, bunnies charging into battle on emus (I saw a picture on the internet, so it’s true), and of course, giant toxic asshole toads.

Today’s Moment of Science… Australia’s conqueror, the cane toads

From the Bufonidae family, the cane toad, aka the Rhinella marina, is a cousin to the Bufo genus of hallucinogenic toads. They’re almost all confirmed to produce some form of bufotoxin from their parotoid glands. It’s pharmacologically nifty and potentially dangerous stuff. Some of these toxins have applications in cancer treatments. Some of them are cardiotoxic, causing abnormal heart rhythms. Some of them make you hallucinate.

Please don’t lick this at home, kids.

This story technically starts in the 1840s, when the cane toads ventured from South America to become an invasive species for the first time. Apparently they’d been used at home for pest control. They were first unsuccessfully used for rat control in Jamaica. But if at first you don’t succeed, send the death toad to another fucking country.

Deployed against a particularly hungry beetle in Puerto Rico, in the 1930s the cane toad reportedly emerged victorious in defending sugar cane fields. Although it’s suspected that some concurrent changes in the environment were also factors, cane toads largely receive credit for this one.

With the success in Puerto Rico, cane toads were the hottest thing on the organic pest control market. Don’t use chemicals, just ship over some hallucinogenic amphibians and let nature take its course. Rhinella marina made its way to Japan, the Philippines, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, many countries in the Caribbean, and of course, fucking Florida.

There was solid proof of concept. Fifty percent of the time it works every time.
What could go wrong?

In Australia, they were dealing with Frenchi and greyback cane beetles. The larvae ate and destroyed the roots of the sugar cane. The toads unfortunately weren’t digging into the dirt to protect the harvest. Furthermore, the beetles tended to live on the upper stalks of the plants, and cane toads couldn’t jump anywhere near high enough to get to them.

The beetles are fine. They’re fucking fine.

I mean farmers are using insecticides to manage them now, but the cane toads? Still ignoring them and eating goddamn everything else.

When the cane toads arrived in Australia, there were 102 of them. There are estimated to be 200 million of them now. They have 8,000-25,000 eggs at a time, generally twice a year. Being toxic as fuck and having a highly adaptable diet has worked out for the species as it’s slowly taken over the goddamn continent.

The introduction and subsequent population boom of the cane toads has caused direct and indirect damage to the rest of the ecosystem. If a fish eats one of these fuckers as a tadpole, that’s gonna be its last meal. People joke about dogs licking the toads and hallucinating, but they’re a real danger if your dog gets just a little too curious and takes a nibble. Predators don’t make a habit of hunting for a creature that kills you right back. The cane toad climbs over native species up the Australian food chain, largely undisturbed. Humans’ best attempts to get the population under control have made so little progress that many places have largely accepted their fate with the asshole toad.

In all fairness on this one, the idea to grab a three and a half pound toxic toad from South America and drop it into sugar cane fields to go all “proxy war, motherfucker” with beetles on their behalf didn’t start in Australia. However, there’s something deeply Australian about it turning into a decades-long tale of ecological imbalance with this alarmingly robust little cuntwhistle.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, a little terrified at what’s going to be used next to fight the cane toads, but I really hope it’s vermicious knids.

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