TikTok ‘frog army’ stunt could have grave consequences, experts warn | Hacker News Reader

TikTok ‘frog army’ stunt could have grave consequences, experts warn

theguardian.com

105 pointsGordonS74 comments

Somehow I doubt the claim that you can get 100 million ladybugs for $75 as the (edit) original post mentioned in the knowyourmeme post claims: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/ladybug-raid

A gallon seems to be commonly listed as 72k-74k insects and seems to typically cost well above $100.

I don't think someone released 5 cubic meters of ladybugs for tiktok. And I'm disappointed that journalists from allegedly reputable media simply parrot such claims as "unverified" without pointing out the implausibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIWsAIr5mSg from Knowyourmeme shows what happened a bit better.

Yes. The numbers seems vastly exaggerated by the TikTok’ers. But the biologists in the article are concerned not whether or not those examples are hoaxes, but by the oncoming popularity of releasing insects and other animals where they shouldn’t be released.

Agreed; it is likely that the tiktok'er did release some, probably a few thousands.

Would be still a big disaster

Why? A few thousand ladybugs is like a few thousand flies, there are so many ladybugs already that they wouldn't make a dent. In areas without pesticides you often see hundreds of them sitting and eating the parasites on some bush.

Because alien species mate and reproduce, growing exponentially. Hidding a bomb in a building is a much milder menace that causes a damage once.

This would be like using a bomb able to make and disseminate more bombs, each one able to make and disseminate more bombs before exploding. And the iteration runs forever basically.

Ladybugs are like houseflies, they exist all over the world.

Then, I hope you don't mind if I release this tsetse flies in your dormitory, they are just like the other domestic flies. Unless you are a trained entomologist, you wouldn't even notice that they are there.

there are many different species of ladybug distribute on the world

But is there any reason to think they released foreign ladybugs? Importing live insects isn't that easy because they could cause problems, much easier to just get domestic ones. Domestic ladybugs exists everywhere.

And the species of ladybug released is .....? Can you identify and name it?

One problem is that it could happen, and if it goes trendy It will happen.

Even if this is a hoax, is encouraging a massive audience of children to do the same. For tiktokers there is not difference. After all, If is a ladybug is a fire class pokemon predator of pests. Right?

False.

Other is that could provide logistic support to people trying to spread it purposely.

Another is the message:

1) Environmental laws are something that we shouldn't obey, because we know better than adults... and ice cream, and sparkling unicorns

2) Releasing thousands of cute animals in nature is fine.

Even if you are clueless about the risks or can't even identify the animal that you are releasing among the 6000 species of ladybugs.

They may not be aware that some ladybug relatives are herbivorous and eat crops (Surprise!). And if you found a zillion of ladybugs in a local area ready to be packed and sent by mail to your cousin, they most probably will fall in this category.

They may not be aware that some alien ladybugs are in turn predators of native ladybugs

Some even may don't care at all as long as use this virtue signaling videos to win popularity and became the bee-queen in their group of friends

I don't know, maybe in your country this correct, but the video spread out across whole world. even in same country, it is probably that there are different species in different regions. the only way can escape this is maybe ladybugs will die soon in urban/city, but is this a good behaviour we hope kids learning? bringing so many creatures and let them died for fun are bad.

There are areas where Ladybugs are welcomed. I had to resort to other means to clean lice from my sour cherry tree.

Quickly googling, 100M ladybugs seems like it would weigh almost 1000lbs. That's just the weight of the bugs: you'd need to package all that safely, and the sheer size would be equivalent to a public works project. The cost would be enormous and the time and resources needed to actually put them somewhere would be incredible.

It's not just improbable, it's impossible given the logistics and cost. I'd be surprised if you could even source 100M live ladybugs if you had the resources to buy and handle them.

I find it exceedingly improbable that he has actually bred that many frogs. The 1.4million estimate comes from _him_, on TikTok. None of the videos show anywhere near that amount. Even if they only measured 1cm^3 that'd still be more than a cubic metre of frogs completely packed -- wouldn't fit in his pond.

I also do not see the danger of relocation, he has harvested the eggs from the same place he used to breed the frogs.

IMO this is just plain alarmist.

It was pointed out multiple times that frog guy took footage from random frog videos off youtube. While acts like that are dangerous, this whole thing is blown out of proportion, and guardian is a few weeks too late.

The claim is 1.4 million eggs that have hatched into tadpoles. For some species of frog, the average number of eggs laid exceeds 10,000.

If we’re talking of such a species and all of them were to hatch, that would take less than 140 female frogs.

Upper ceiling on the Common frog found in the UK is 2000 eggs. So that's 700 females spawning at max capacity.

Having lived in areas where these frogs are common, I don't believe the numbers for a second.

Even if all went as planned, and we forget all about the epidemic that is killing frogs, we are talking about removing millions of viable eggs from the nature. Eggs from a species in decline and, even worse, bragging about it.

Just to pack "millions of them" in a place that can sustain food for, maybe, one hundred tadpoles?.

Does not seem like a wise move. Would compromise the success in the breeding areas for nothing. And would be clearly illegal in many countries.

Rescuing tadpoles to a pond (in the same area) could be "justified" in a few cases like a temporary mud puddle that is drying really fast, but messing with the ecosystems just for likes is an horrible idea.

> removing millions of viable eggs

This is the part I do not agree with. There is no way he was able to harvest that many eggs. We're talking about multiple wheelbarrows worth of eggs that would have had to be found (in murky terrain, hard to see), harvested, transported.. this is not a one-teenager project. Nowhere in the videos does he show any sort of tools more advanced than a bucket to help with this -- you would not be able to do it with a bucket.

Other commenters have pointed out his videos were stolen from Youtube, so the amount of eggs he actually probably harvested from nature is 0.

So I have a medium sized koi pond in a residential area. The frogs have insane orgies in there every year. When the tadpoles finally turn into frogs the size of raisins I have to watch where I walk when heading to my car or coming back in so I don't step on them since they are everywhere. 1.4 million is a lot of frogs, and I don't think even my frog orgy produces that many.

Moreover, tadpoles don't just grow magically into full sized frogs. What are they eating? There's simply not enough biomass available in any location to support that many frogs growing to maturity and then keeping them alive.

Unless you've got 100M ladybugs, I guess.

What do you feed the ladybugs? Buy a billion aphids?

This is an interesting aspect of information warfare. Several companies have emerged that know how to capitalize on their ability to seed social media groups and create viral trends.

You could have a set of trends that are calculated to cause maximum harm to local eco systems.

Location based serving makes it easy to disseminate these campaigns to exact locations. This is an incredibly potent weapon and seems it's been flying under the radar for quite some time now.

Now this seems like a dystopian episode of black mirror :O

Not new. Is happening since thousands of years.

They just improved it manipulating dumb children to do the dirt job and take all the risk.

The genius part is that children will do it just for a pat in the back.

Location-targeting is the next level, yes. It's been suggested for decades that certain cultural trends are calculated and nurtured to sow division in specific countries.

And no matter how much evidence you present, nobody will ever take it seriously.

Here's a random recent example from last month, Facebook still enabling ongoing genocide via hate speech in targeted ads https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/e...

Not their first platform-enabled genocide (that was years ago), and still not doing anything effectively to mitigate it

>This isn’t the first time that we have found that Facebook is unable to detect clear examples of hate speech: earlier this year we found that they were unable to detect Burmese language hate speech directed against the Rohingya minority.

These genocides are not Facebook incidentally intersecting with the real world and reflecting its reality... These genocides, in how they have succeeded, would not have been possible without Facebook's implicit cooperation. Facebook's profits off the ads responsible for these atrocities, or conversely the lower ad revenue of these so-called second tier countries that are not Facebook's primary focus (I can find this reference again if requested), are a curious incentive to not eagerly take meaningful action

what companies?

"Let's make the biblical plagues happen artificially" seems like a great new trend, even if we've seen it occur naturally recently.

As for that flying under the radar, I suppose that depends on how attentive a person was to the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco.

We're living in an interesting time where things that aren't illegal (because "why would we need a law for that? no one has any incentive to do anything of the sort") are being done because some people now have an incentive.

There are limits to rule based systems. I always believed that a common sense based system is superior.

It should be clear that those things are bad and should not be done. You still do them? Deal with the punishment.

This is an interesting comment. I agree that, “there are limits to rule based systems”. I think there is much less potential for abuse though. I don’t know what the solution is. I’d love fore you to be right and judges to have a keen sense of “I know it when I see it”. Something tells me they don’t though. Power is too corrupting.

They feed and target an army of boycotting minors, because minors can't be punished by law in the same way as an adult would be. If things got hairy will flash a "Just Kidding". Very low risks for the people moving the puppets at ten thousands Km of distance, also.

But the economic damage is real and persistent.

This is bad in almost all developed countries. Minors are acting bad and cannot be punished. Understandable that you dont want to put away a minor in a prison and you cannot hurt them financially either.

But our systems are too slow to adapt to new modern forms of punishment.

You want to punish a minor? Ban all his social media accounts for 3 months, take away the mobile phone and other electronics, ban the phone number, push them to do to social work during holidays.

Yet, something something human rights... and we have those brats who are terrible. Just experienced some yesterday. They are simply hostile and feel empowered by their peers.

They will grow up at some point, but until that, they must be disciplined.

Does that include the dominance of global corporations, countries, and genders?

From an insect perspective, the larger tractors and deeper cutting ploughs have reduced the need for pesticides on farm crops, at the expense of destroying the habitat of insects that spend some of their time in the soil.

Lol there’s no such thing as common sense especially in a large and highly diverse population such as “social media users”

This is a pretty succinct description of why social media is a cancer on society.

*advertising

Social media alone wouldn’t encourage that nor would even host the content for free unless they can make money off it (and make more than it costs to host it). Nobody in their right mind would pay actual money to watch this content though, so the only way this currently survives is advertising. Eradicate that and a lot of the harms of social media go away.

I don’t know where you’re getting your opinion from because it’s also completely possible (and extremely likely) for a paid social media service to present harmful/false content to its users for as long as its users are enjoying it.

Yupp, take stepping on animals fetish or monkey cry (don't look it up, it's a rabbit hole of insane people torturing monkeys).

I mean hell there's been child porn studios operating like any other business.

Unfortunately this is likely to lead to a lot more poorly conceived legislation down the line (at least in the UK, which loves knee jerk lawmaking)

I don't think it's that new. It reminds me of the person in the 19th century who brought every bird mentioned by Shakespeare to America, largely for the publicity, and now starlings are a massive pest throughout the country.

Sure, there's always been the occasional outlier. The difference now is the frequency and scale.

TikTok really specializes at exploiting this niche though. They deserve at least some of the blame.

Is educating children into some types of what is social disturbance and economic terrorism basically, taking profit of their rebel phase and greed.

People thinks that there is not damage into releasing ladybugs, but is a profoundly wrong idea. If they are Asian Harlequin ladybugs, that predate benefit ladybugs, this... girl?, man disguised as girl?, boy hidden under several identities?...

...this "agent" has taken a lot of trouble to commit an act of environmental terrorism. Purposely or not. The same insect toke the entire UK by assault in just ten years.

Once upon a time, biology was a respected science, now all you see are clueless clowns doing the opposite that must be done, because scientists say that is a bad idea.

This children are puppets and pawns. Five minutes of laugh and fame, The rest of their lives paying the bill in the shape of increased taxes.

Reminds me of the American Acclimatization Society. Back in the 1800s some people thought it was nice to bring European flora and fauna over to America. One of the results is a population of hundreds of millions of starlings. For its role in the decline of local native species and the damages to agriculture, the European starling has been included in the IUCN List of the world's 100 worst invasive species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Acclimatization_Socie...

Approximately 2% of frog eggs become tadpoles, 0.8% of tadpoles become froglets, and 0.1% of froglets become mature frogs capable of reproduction. However, these figures vary based on frog species, predation, and habitat. Some favorable environments may see higher average survival rates of 1 – 2%.

https://toadsnfrogs.com/how-many-tadpoles-survive/

I don't think his plan is going to work.

My rule of thumb is if the media wants me to get upset about an issue I try not to.

Ditto. And when the local robot chorus is pushing a story, I know that's something to ignore.

Tiktok is a national security threat for US. No idea why they are still letting it operate here given it’s directly controlled by an adversary.

Because we're not China and our internet is thankfully unregulated (beyond obvious things that violate federal law like child abuse)

Facebook, google and their daddy NSA are a personal security threat for me. I’ll take tiktok anyday.

We are living in a fascinating time, especially because Social Media explosion is happening in parallel across the world.

Earlier, technological progress would sprout in developed nations and trickle down to the rest of the developing or under developed world over a period of time.

But SM is a beast that is rampaging evenly everywhere.

The next decade or so will be a great study in its impact, especially contrasting it across different society stratas and gain valuable insights into human nature and how societal environment directs responses.

I was diving a little in the history and is even more interesting, in unsuspected ways.

To start, I'm not 100% sure, but the fuzzy ladybugs in the video seem compatible with some of the multiple faces of the Asian ladybug Harmonia. This is bad news.

Ladybugs eat other ladybugs eggs as a normal behavior to assure food for their own larvae. For some reason, when native species ate Harmonia eggs they died. Many ladybugs are poisonous and Harmonia is one of them, so researchers searched in vain for poison in the eggs. Finally the culprit was disclosed: Eggs have a bodyguard symbiont that kills the insects that eat them.

So this children are not just releasing ladybugs. They are most probably spreading also a lethal parasite of the native species of ladybugs that protect our crops.

Another dire warning of why environmental management and ecology must be left to professionals.

It sounds like the frogs are native to his location. Why is the article framing it as invasive species?

They could host ranaviruses, destroying purposely their services to agriculture in entire areas. This is serious money.

Children shouldn't be encouraged to mess with the hard work of environmental conservators. In the same way as they should not be encouraged to unscrew and collect things from major engineering works like bridges or railways.

The frog army videos are probably fake, see https://www.tiktok.com/@greenerbee/video/7108136947738103045

I guess that is better than the "TikTok induced epilepsy" they were shouting about a few months ago.

Remember when D&D and Heavy Metal music were causing suicides, satanic cults, and mass murders? It's a miracle our species survives innit.

I read the article and understand the issues here, but I'm so tired of seeing everything weird, wrong or bad done by someone somewhere using TikTok being used to frame TikTok as evil.

At this time, the platform is less the issue than the fact that humans have fallen for the spell of social media. Because there is no "gatekeeper" or news editor, information can be spread by anyone regardless of how smart/stupid the idea/information is. The more idiotic the idea, the more people tend to let it take hold. TikTok is just the latest to be hit by it. People are the problem.

Having said that, the platforms have now learned to amplify the "trending" ideas to ensure more and more see it via algorithmic promotion rather than organic spreading. If one platform's algos are better at promoting crap, does that mean the platform is bad/worse that's the problem, or that people's unsatiable thirst for idiocy is to blame?

Binley Mega Chippy, giant frog army - UK users of TikTok know the tabloids will amplify any idiotic bit of mobile phone video thus giving them user interaction. Tiktok bleeds over onto youtube as well - I'm bombarded by tiktok videos by their algos despite never having shown any interest. (Also the ad for conjoined twins I'm shown everytime I go to youtube on top left).

Real idiocracy level behaviors being mined to extract advertising value, including by the Grauniad

Sounds like failure in Biology education and people demand control of speech to fix it.

I'm very worried of the trend that everyone demands speech control to fix something they see as an issue(be it legitimate issue or not).

Netflix makes gay, Google make Woke, Youtube kills people with high voltage currents ,Facebook makes Nazi, TikTok kills the environment - depending on who you ask. I'm really getting very tired of this cancel culture. Destroy something, remove something.

Till very recently we had teenagers swatting(the practice of calling armed police with pretext of armed incident) each others when gaming. Is that still a thing?

What about actually addressing the core issues and introduce harm prevention mechanisms? I think the problems the social media causes is essentially dependent on something goes big too fast to have proper response. We don't really need to control speech, just need tools to cater to the new reality of fast spreading information.

If there's actual damage done, then probably that location needs better environment protection laws and institutions. People were destroying the envoronment way before the social media and that's how we have rules on waste disposal or animal farming.

>I'm very worried of the trend that everyone demands speech control to fix something they see as an issue(be it legitimate issue or not). >Netflix makes gay, Google make Woke, Youtube kills people with high voltage currents ,Facebook makes Nazi, TikTok kills the environment - depending on who you ask. I'm really getting very tired of this cancel culture. Destroy something, remove something

Small and independent websites have been taken offline for less. Why should these conglomerates who extinguished the original web be given a free pass? Ban them all, I say.

I think small and independent should also not be taken down. I also don't advocate for free pass, I say we shouldn't look for solution in cancellation of people or platforms.

Close the website or ban the users should never be our first response. As I said, we should demand tools to counter this.

For example, environment protection groups can demand exposure, i.e. a link or a paragraph under the videos of the people who do these questionable things.

If this behaviour is an actually damaging thing, reach the kids in school to tell them what's the problem with it.

> What about actually addressing the core issues and introduce harm prevention mechanisms? I think the problems the social media causes is essentially dependent on something goes big too fast to have proper response. We don't really need to control speech, just need tools to cater to the new reality of fast spreading information.

I wonder how a YouTube with a max-views limit would work. Similar with Twitter. Content "removed" after 250k views or something.

Reupload with mirrored video or whatnot is already a thing.

Why can't we have good tiktok memes like for example planting trees.

I understand the concern. That said, globalization has products, humans and species moving around the world and no one is calling that into question.

Oddly enough, just look at Covid. It was easily spread via travel. But the future threat at fame & follow seeking kids on TikTok?

Cool. Like based trophic cascades. What's next?

The time has to be approaching to ban under 18s from social media. If we don't i truly fear a mental health catastrophe for the next gen.

Ban, cancel, censor and arrest. That's what the reactionaries always push. Surely there's a more graceful response.

I'd support banning teenagers from the internet, not for the sake of their mental health but for the quality of internet discourse.

lot of anti-tiktok propaganda lately, let's remind ourselves:

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...

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