
Frogpocalypse Now - Thevet
https://www.outsideonline.com/2167161/frogpocalypse-now
======
munificent
I 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.

~~~
fwefwwfe
Someone imported and released Capybaras?

~~~
munificent
Imported, yes. According to this article, they escaped into the wild:

[https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/capybaras-
may-b...](https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/capybaras-may-be-
poised-be-florida%E2%80%99s-next-invasive-rodent)

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panglott
My 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-
CAN...](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)

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...](http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/11/kentucky-hopes-youll-eat-its-
invasive-carp/382844/)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWYm_inOAgg&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWYm_inOAgg&t=2s)

~~~
Jedd
Replace '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_anim...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_Australian_animals_to_cane_toads)

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zafka
I 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.

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cmccart
My 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)

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protomyth
_Cane 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
That 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
The 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
It'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?

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PhasmaFelis
> _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?

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robot
I wish they included an actual picture of the cane toad in the article.

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DannyB2
Frogpocalypse was one of the Biblical curses on Egypt in Exodus. But not a
curse described anywhere in The Revelation.

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pehtis
The 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?

~~~
riri-au
That video is a classic, I'm pretty sure most Australians watched it in
school, and remember this scene:
[https://youtu.be/rm3hd1pxHME?t=44](https://youtu.be/rm3hd1pxHME?t=44)

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macintux
I'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.

~~~
shuntress
This 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).

~~~
macintux
We 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.

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JoeAltmaier
I wonder if efforts similar to mosquito control would work. Release sterilized
males. Dry up breeding holes. Spray.

------
why-el
Otherwise known as Magnolia.

