Travelling in Queensland, you cannot miss them. In fact, you might try to miss them, especially when driving along coutryside roads after dark, but you simply can’t. Because there are millions of them. If you have ever been to Queensland, you probably know what I am talking about. For those who haven’t, let me introduce you one of Northeastern Australia’s biggest headaches: the cane toads.
They are huge warty toads, and although everybody hates them nowadays, they were deliberately introduced to Australia from South America by the sugar cane industry. The cane beetle caused huge damage to the sugar cane plantations that are so prevalent in this part of Australia and the toads were supposed to eat the beetles. However, once the cane toad arrived here it found so many better things to eat that it decided to pass on the cane beetle. Instead, the cane toads seems to take over the country. In lack of a natural predator, their population is spinning completely out of control. Other native Australian animals trying to eat the cane toad will do so only once, as the toads are poisonous and will kill whoever dared to eat it. So these days, once the sun goes down in Queensland, the cane toads come out. Millions of them. Lawns are littered with them, streets are sprinkled. They were brought to fight a pest, and they developed into one themselves. And for now there doesn’t seem to be a solution. Except for that we have heard Chinese people eat them, apparently there is a way to carefully remove the poison glands, which renders them edible. I wonder why nobody has made a business out of that, exporting Queensland’s cane toads to China. It seems like a win-win situation, and one billion Chinese should be able to take care of a few million cane toads…
