Astonishing Antipodean Antics

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They Don't Even Taste Good With Garlic

Documented: Cane toads are now a plague, originally imported to eat cane beetles.

They are ugly, poisonous (even their eggs are poisonous), freakily fertile and relentless in their progress to new feeding grounds. This is, of course, why other Aussies call all Queenslanders "Cane Toads".

Just 102 _bufo marinus_ were imported to Queensland from Hawaii in 1935 to provide us with today's metric buttload of the damn things infesting ever larger areas of our wide brown land.

They can be up to 2kg in weight and 25 cm (10 inches) in snout to vent length. They eat the eggs and larvae of native aquatic and wetlands species and any mammal (native or domestic) which tries to eat them dies. It appears that some reptiles learn to avoid toads after a single mouth burning taste, and some birds have learnt to flip them over and eat everything but the poison glands.

And they don't even eat the cane beetles - the toads live on the ground and the beetles live about four feet up - so they never even got introduced.

References:

• But at least they're not a threat to pastoralists: Canetoads in the tropical savannah
• The Face Only A Mother Could Love