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Frogpocalypse Now
- DannyB2 10y agoFrogpocalypse was one of the Biblical curses on Egypt in Exodus. But not a curse described anywhere in The Revelation.
- frog1 10y agoMaybe there's another frogpocalypse in our future. http://fav.me/d411gpx http://fav.me/d411gpx
- macintux 10y agoI've long thought that if I had one "save the world" wish I'd have to think hard about confining invasive species to their native habitats. Admittedly, climate change, nuclear war, and space rocks are more dangerous, but man, getting rid of honeysuckle, kudzu, emerald ash borers, cane toads, etc would be quite an improvement.
- mikestew 10y agoThat reminds me, I need to prioritize ripping blackberry plants, which obviously love their new Washington state environment, from my backyard. I'm constantly reminding my mother when I visit her in Florida that, no, taking some clippings of that plant back home is probably not a good idea. You'd think it wouldn't be much of an argument after she just went on about what a problem cane toads are.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- shuntress 10y agoThis is just an arbitrary human whim that goes against nature. That's not to say we shouldn't try to control where animals do or do not live. But do not fool yourself into thinking that removing 'invasive' species is anything other than human avarice. The natural order is for anything to live anywhere it can (like we do).
- colanderman 10y agoThe "natural order" (whatever that means) is for species migration to take place over the course of thousands of years, not an overnight plane ride.
- macintux 10y agoWe caused most of the current problem in this area, so it's not entirely "natural". Of course life spreads wherever it can, but we actively pushed it into places faster than local flora and fauna could adjust to it.
- michaelmrose 10y agoIn order to analyze something we need to define what variables or aspects we care about and we then can see it in that context. Natural means nothing in any context. It is entirely free of meaningful content. To argue otherwise involves imagining there is a schism at some point between what is natural and not despite everything including intelligence and tool use is part of the natural world.
- sbov 10y ago...Humans?
- lgas 10y agoIn the case of invasive species, isn't their natural habitat "everywhere"? If so, good news, you got your wish :)
- djrogers 10y agoGP stated 'native habitat', not 'natural' - implying where they originated, as opposed to where they can thrive.
- why-el 10y agoOtherwise known as Magnolia.
- protomyth 10y agoCane toads have these things going for them: they are bigger than other toads (the biggest cane toad on record weighed 5 pounds 13 ounces, almost as much as a Kalashnikov rifle) Is that a bit of a Freudian slip indicating what the author wants to do with the toads?
- LordKano 10y agoThat struck me as odd too. I know roughly how much one of those rifles weighs but I would imagine that the vast majority of the people reading this have never held one.
- protomyth 10y agoThe more I think about it the odder the line. I've been around a lot of guns, but that is not one family of guns I have seen in person.
- LordKano 10y agoIt's arguably the most common family of guns on the planet. I have owned some but it's still an odd unit of measure to me. Along those lines, how many Libraries of Congress is that?
- vilhelm_s 10y agoAnd it doesn't seem very exact? Wikipedia says an AK-47 weighs 7.7 lb without the magazine.
- rjsw 10y agoIsn't that the kind of thing that everyone wants to do to cane toads ?
- protomyth 10y agoSeems like a waste of bullets and the potential to spray some poison everywhere. I would go with thick gloves and a bucket.
- panglott 10y agoMy first thought was: are they edible? The venom is in the skin and shoulders. & apparently the answer is yes, if you kill them in the freezer and skin them. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2634736/How-like-CANE-TOAD-cooked-Australian-food-blogger-uses-pest-species-cook-dishes-make-French-blush.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2634736/How-like-CAN... Harvesting for human or animal consumption or fertilizer is about the only thing we can do about the Asian carp invasion of the Mississippi River. There are now some commercial carp fisheries in Kentucky for this. You can't angle for them because they're filter feeders, but they can be snagged, netted, or bowfished. http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/11/kentucky-hopes-youll-eat-its-invasive-carp/382844/ http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/11/kentucky-hopes-youll-eat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWYm_inOAgg&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWYm_inOAgg&t=2s
- Jedd 10y agoReplace 'edible' with 'usable' ... as the leather apparently is quite tough, and there's been quite some good work on that front. However, as TFA points out, there's 1.5 billion cane toads in AU, and even if we exported a whole lotta shoes, handbags, etc ... it's not going to make much of a dent in this frustratingly renewable resource. Aside -- back to 'are they edible' -- there is some interesting adaptive traits being observed[1] with native animals working out how to kill, and selectively consume components of these things, without dying. Unfortunately lots of animals are still dying after eating these things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_Australian_animals_to_cane_toads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_Australian_anim...
- cmccart 10y agoMy college horticulture professor had us watch this hilarious, informative documentary on cane toads and I cannot recommend it enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SBLf1tsoaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SBLf1tsoaw
- munificent 10y agoI lived in Orlando for eight years. I find Florida an ecologically fascinating place. It's the only corner of the continental US that has an honest-to-God jungle climate, which makes it an unusual island in North America that is amenable to non-native species from many parts of South America, Africa, and Asia. On top of that, Florida has a weird cultural history around exoticism. Florida used to be be a little slice of overseas tropical paradise that car-bound American vacationers could still get to. The kind of people who settled in Florida often came for that, or played it up. You had people owning all sorts of unusual exotic pets and fish. And, then, inevitably, they get discarded when the owners realize that, oops, that cute little baby python is now big enough to eat the family dog. Drive around in south Florida, and you may run into swamp eels, snakehead, walking catfish, pacu, grass carp bigger than toddlers, hordes of lionfish blanketing reefs, Cuban treefrogs, cane toads, caiman, basilisks, chameleons, iguanas, geckos, nile monitors (up to five feet long), boas (ten feet), Burmese pythons (the largest was 17 feet!), ibises, parrots, macaws, cockatoos, parakeets, toucans, macaques, monkeys, and capybaras. So now, strangely, Florida has actually become the exotic enclave the locals tried to emulate with their non-native pets. It increasingly feels like another world.
- reddytowns 10y agoSounds like taking a single step into the jungle would now be very dangerous.
- fwefwwfe 10y agoSomeone imported and released Capybaras?
- munificent 10y agoImported, yes. According to this article, they escaped into the wild: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/capybaras-may-be-poised-be-florida%E2%80%99s-next-invasive-rodent https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/capybaras-may-b...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zafka 10y agoI started beekeeping a while back and put two hives in the back yard. I had one sitting on top of cinder blocks. Next thing I Knew, I had several Cane toads sitting in front of the hive gobbling up bees as they returned home.
- robot 10y agoI wish they included an actual picture of the cane toad in the article.
- pehtis 10y agoThe same thing happened in Australia decades ago. There is a 1988 documentary called "Cane Toads: An Unnatural History" that tells that story. Any information on the extend of the problem today?
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI wonder if efforts similar to mosquito control would work. Release sterilized males. Dry up breeding holes. Spray.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago> Florida’s cane toads are believed to descend from escapees from an exotic-animal importer at the Miami airport, where a hundred of them got away in 1955. I've heard repeatedly that the hazards of inbreeding make it nearly impossible for a species to recover if the population drops too low. There's a theory that the human population bottlenecked down to 20,000 or so individuals 70,000 years ago, and that we nearly went extinct as a result; the scars are still visible today, in the low genetic diversity of modern humans. So how does a breeding population of a mere 100 frogs remain a going concern dozens of generations later?
- frog1 10y agoComing soon... http://imgur.com/a/5QXoz http://imgur.com/a/5QXoz http://fav.me/d9sl68r http://fav.me/d9sl68r http://fav.me/dalot8q http://fav.me/dalot8q http://fav.me/d411gpx http://fav.me/d411gpx http://fav.me/d9mncc1 http://fav.me/d9mncc1 http://fav.me/d3d1mgz http://fav.me/d3d1mgz http://fav.me/d5nozmc http://fav.me/d5nozmc http://fav.me/d8pbhsv http://fav.me/d8pbhsv