Frogpocalypse Now
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
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...
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...
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?
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?
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.