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Australian wildlife redux

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Please meet Toadzilla, six times larger than an average cane toad and the size of a football.

toadzilla

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  5. This is proof of what I’ve always suspected: every single animal in Australia has evolved so that it can kill you and, more often than not, eat you.

    Still, I’d like to visit one day. Though I will stay well away from football-sized toads. *Shivers*

    • Alas the cane toad is not native having been introduced to eat the cane beetle larvae (something they failed to do. Like the Giant Hogweed “Their power is growing”

      “Stamp them out, we must destroy them.”

      • See also: cats, rabbits, foxes, feral pigs, feral goats, brumbies – all a disaster.

        There are far more feral cats than domestic cats in Oz, and between them they kill over 1.5 billion native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs, and 1.1 billion invertebrates each year. Remarkably, the cat lobby kicks up a mighty fuss if a cull is suggested.

  6. She, and it is a she, has euthanased apparently.

    There’s another delightful Australian resident which is a bird which lives exclusively off rubbish and food taken from your hand, which grabs cane toads, bashes them about so they release poison onto the surface of their skin and then rinses them in water (down by the billibong?) and eats them. Evolution in action.

    • Puffer fish are poisonous to sea birds, but their eyes are OK to eat.
      So when you see fish skeletons (a la Tom & Jerry) all around a foreshore – the dead puffer fish will be fully intact, apart from the eyes. So who tells the birds about this, then? How do they know?

  7. The kids at the school I was teaching at in a township in Zimbabwe were digging a trench. The girls were doing the heavy work , of course. They marched back to the quadrangle with a toad/frog with a pick through its head. It was about the size Thep’s cane toad. Can still see it in my memory to this day.

    • We had a tank full of Xenopus in the Bilge lab when I was doing Bilge A level. Hideous things, but when you look after them as I did (Frog Monitor) you eventually get quite fond of the ugly (not so) little buggers. Nowhere near the size of the OP monster, but way bigger than what you’d find in your average British pond. I also had a thriving colony of locusts in a heated tank (Plague Monitor as well). Proper little Attenborough I was as a sixth-former.

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