Sounds like the name of a song but it’s quite a serious business in the Northern parts of Australia.
We all reminisce about the many different species of cute frogs that once were found in abundance in this great land of ours, but now many of them have disappeared because of the introduction of the cane toad.
In 1935, in their infinite wisdom, the government of the day introduced 102 the cane toad to combat the grey backed cane beetle and the Frenchie beetle.
The cane toad proved to be ineffective for this task as the cane toads cannot jump very high so were unable to reach the upper stalks of the sugar cane and couldn’t reach the beetles higher up.
There was an insecticide produced 5 years later and the cane toads were left to do what cane toads do best and that was reproduce, within 6 months there were tens of thousands of these pests. They have spread across Queensland and into the Northern Territory and have now been found in Northern New South Wales.
A female cane toad can lay between 8000 and 30000 eggs at a time (anytime). Most native Australian frogs lay between 1000 and 2000 eggs per year. So our native frogs didn’t stand a chance against these ghastly predators.
The cane toad has no known predators and pets are at risk because of the toxins within the skin of the toads.
This is just another example of Governments not undertaking enough research into the kinds of pests they introduce simply to appease one or other vocal lobby groups, in this case the Sugar Industry.