Citizen Cane Toad

Scientific bodies in Australia have a rich and comedic history when it comes to dealing with threats to our native flora and fauna. If there’s some exotic species out there, threatening the local ecological balance, never fear, because our forward thinking visionaries in the natural sciences will save the day.

Remember the prickly pear? No, neither do I, but from the 1860s to the 1920s, it was eating 400,000 hectares of Australia a year. The boffins imported a beastie called the Cactoblastis Moth, and in a year it cleared 11 million hectares. I’m sure you do remember what happened next.

It ran out of prickly pear and started taking children and domestic pets. It was eventually controlled by military intervention, when it was driven out to sea. It took up residence on a desert island, just to the east of New Guinea, and there it lurks, biding its time and waiting for the right moment to launch its counter-offensive. The Japanese have immortalised it in several interesting documentaries, battling Godzilla. (Quite a good portion of the above two paragraphs is absolutely true.)

Another backfire in biological warfare we’re all aware of is your chosen method to control a pest called the Cane Beetle. Nobody remembers the Cane Beetle, but everybody knows the cure.

What you do is search other continents for the most hideous, poisonous, feral, fast breeding lump of revulsion you can find, and import a few of the fecund bastards into your untouched wilderness.

What they will then do is rip across your top-end, killing everything that’s ever looked at a toad and thought 'jeez, I’m hungry. I guess it will have to do'.

We here at A Grey Area Institute of Fuzzy Things and Monumental Balls-Ups call it the “Perhaps She’ll Die” method of ecological management. (As in, “I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.”)

They are not content with the fallout from the first attempt at vermin control by introducing something worse, though. It appears that the work experience boy has come bounding up the sandstone stairs at Sydney Uni, tugged on the sleeve of a sleeping professor, and when prof has jolted awake and wiped the dribble from the corner of his mouth, he’s been hit with something he just knows is going to get him back in the papers.

From the news this week:

Professor Shine says researchers are also interested in releasing small sterile cane toads in areas yet to be infiltrated by the invading pest…Professor Shine says if animals eat the smaller "teacher toads" they will become ill and learn that the unfamiliar amphibians are poisonous.

You just know that's going to go well.

What is wrong with these guys? Has the work experience boy noticed that students get nauseous around teacher and thinks that this translates into the wild?

I, for one, wouldn’t trust a Cane Toad to stay sterile. Knowing them, they would be released into an untouched part of the country, look around, notice how much room there was and promptly grow a fresh set of nads. They are the von Neumann device of the natural world and exist only to replicate until there is nothing but them from here to the horizon.

Another thing that worries me is: who gets the job of sterilizing Cane Toads? That’s a killer on your CV, isn’t it? Toad Knackerer.

“So, you're standing here alone at this lovely party, and I thought I’d come over and say hello. What’s your name and what’s your game?”

“My name is Kyle Sandilands, and I sterilize Cane Toads.”

“Wow. I did not see that coming. So, I imagine it’s a pretty specialised field.”

“Yeah it is really. It’s funny how you get into these things.”

“I bet.”

“I can't work out why, but I became one of the most hated people in the Australian media, so I needed a break, because actually I'm absolutely fantastic. So, this guy I know was helping out in the Chinese Panda breeding program. I became a Panda wanker. It was really fulfilling.”

“Really?!”

“Yeah. Artificial insemination is the only way that they can breed, and someone’s got to get the goo. From there I was meeting with the right sorts of people to get into the exciting field of toad snipping.”

“Wow. What an incredible story. Can you just go over there and stand under that grand piano, sitting precariously on that rickety hoist? Thanks.”