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.
That 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.
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.
In 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.
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?
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.
My thought was that this is just so America, to explain the weight of something by comparing to the weight of a gun, but reading your comment I'm pretty sure that the author intended this mental image.
Yeah, but its a gun (I assume AK-47 but could be the other ones) that most American gun owners have never held. AR-15 would probably be a better comparison gun since its basically "I can add anything without a gunsmith" popular.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
40 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 96.0 ms ] threadhttp://fav.me/d411gpx
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.
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).
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.
Is that a bit of a Freudian slip indicating what the author wants to do with the toads?
Along those lines, how many Libraries of Congress is that?
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... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWYm_inOAgg&t=2s
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SBLf1tsoaw
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.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/capybaras-may-b...
http://www.audubon.org/news/wild-flamingos-return-florida
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?
http://imgur.com/a/5QXoz
http://fav.me/d9sl68r
http://fav.me/dalot8q
http://fav.me/d411gpx
http://fav.me/d9mncc1
http://fav.me/d3d1mgz
http://fav.me/d5nozmc
http://fav.me/d8pbhsv