40 Fun Facts About Cane Toad

What nickname did rangers give the 2.7 kg cane toad found in Queensland's Conway National Park?

Toadzilla, a female about 25 cm long, may be the biggest cane toad ever seen. She was preserved for display at the Queensland Museum.

Mid-20th-century doctors injected a patient's urine into male cane toads to detect which condition?

Pregnancy showed up when sperm appeared in the toad's own urine, a faster test than the older ones that used mammals. Toads did this job for around 20 years.

About one in ten cane toads at the front of Australia's invasion has developed which ailment?

Arthritis is the price of speed. Toads on the frontier have evolved longer legs, bigger bodies and faster movement than the ones left behind.

Australia's cane toads all descend from roughly how many animals shipped in for the first release?

About 100 toads made the trip in June 1935: 102 were shipped and one died of dehydration in transit. They bred so fast that their young were being released into the cane fields within weeks.

Among the world's true toads, the cane toad is considered the champion in which category?

Largest is the title. Females grow significantly longer than males, typically reaching 10 to 15 cm, and the odd giant stretches to about 25 cm.

Which household pets are most often poisoned by cane toads, usually after licking or biting one?

Dogs are especially prone because they lick or bite the toad. Heavy drooling, very red gums and head-shaking are the signs to get to a vet at once.

Which clever Australian birds flip cane toads onto their backs with their beaks to eat them safely?

Crows such as the Torresian crow roll a toad over and eat the non-toxic innards through its underside, so they never swallow the poison.

At pub cane toad races in Australia, the winning punter is commonly expected to do what to the toad?

Kiss it, as the fairy tale demands. The racers are given humorous names, and punters bid on them or back them as they would a horse.

Which animated series spoofed the cane toad plague with a pet bullfrog that overruns Australia?

The Simpsons did it in the episode Bart vs. Australia, where the escaped frog's descendants take over the country and destroy its crops.

Cane toads were released in Queensland's sugar fields to eat which insects that were ruining crops?

Beetles were the target, because their grubs feed on the roots of sugar plants. No evidence shows the toads ever reduced the pest's numbers.

According to an old myth, handling a cane toad or any other toad gives a person which skin problem?

Warts are caused by viral infections, not by amphibians. The bumps on a toad are normal, healthy glands that only happen to look the part.

Cane toads failed as pest control in Australian sugar fields partly because they are poor at what?

Climbing was the problem: the adult pests lived at the tops of the tall stalks, out of reach of a toad on the ground. The fields also gave too little daytime shelter.

Besides oozing poison, how does a cornered cane toad try to scare off a predator?

Puffs itself up: the toad inflates its lungs and lifts its body off the ground so that it looks taller and larger than it really is.

Where on a cane toad's body are the large parotoid glands that ooze its milky poison?

Behind the eyes, one bulging gland sits on each shoulder. Young toads lack these big glands, so they are usually less poisonous than adults.

Cane toad tadpoles in Australia have evolved an unusually strong appetite for which food?

Their own kind is on the menu. In lab trials a hatchling was about 2.6 times more likely to be eaten by an Australian tadpole than by one from the toad's native range.

In Western Australia, scientists fed native predators nausea-laced cane toad meat shaped as what?

Sausages of minced toad and a nausea-inducing chemical were meant to teach wild animals that toads make them sick, so they would leave live ones alone.

The cane toad is an invader in Florida, but in which US state is the cane toad a native animal?

Texas marks the northern tip of the natural range, which runs from the Rio Grande Valley in the state's south all the way down to the central Amazon.

Most frogs only spot prey that moves, but cane toads can also track down food using which sense?

Smell helps a cane toad find meals that never move. Its menu includes pet food left outside and household rubbish.

In Trinidad the cane toad is called a crapaud, which is simply the word for toad in which language?

French gave Trinidadian English the word crapaud. Elsewhere the same animal goes by giant toad, Dominican toad or giant neotropical toad.

The first cane toads released in Australia were shipped in from which Pacific island group?

Hawaii had only just imported the toads itself. Around 150 set loose on Oahu in 1932 had multiplied to more than 105,000 within 17 months.

A female cane toad lays thousands of eggs at once in which form?

Long strings of jelly trail through the water, each holding thousands of black eggs from a single female. The tadpoles can hatch within two days.

What is the name of the milky-white poison that a threatened cane toad secretes from its glands?

Bufotoxin is a mix of compounds rather than one chemical, and people have died after eating the toads. The eggs and tadpoles are toxic too.

Carl Linnaeus named the cane toad after a mistaken belief that the animal also lived where?

The sea is where Dutch zoologist Albertus Seba wrongly thought it lived, so Linnaeus named the species marina. The nickname marine toad has stuck ever since.

Which carnivorous Australian marsupial has gone locally extinct in places after eating cane toads?

Northern quoll numbers at one study site crashed from 45 animals to five right after the toads arrived, and at another site the species vanished.

Cane toads marched into the wetlands of which heritage-listed park in the Northern Territory?

Kakadu was reached in March 2001. The park's risk assessment named native wildlife eating the toads as the greatest danger to its biodiversity.

Australian law puts a cane toad skin chemical in the same drug schedule as which substances?

Heroin and LSD share Schedule 9 with the toad chemical, which is thought to cause mild hallucinations that last less than an hour.

Which big Australian lizards are fed small 'teacher' cane toads so they learn to avoid adults?

Goannas, also called monitor lizards, get a food-poisoning lesson from the small toads. Where toads arrived untaught, one species fell by up to 90%.

In State of Origin rugby league, Queensland are the Cane Toads; what are New South Wales called?

Cockroaches was the name Barry Muir gave them, and Johnny Raper answered with the toad tag for Queensland. A 1980s marketing campaign caricatured both teams that way.

In the children's novel Toad Rage, a cane toad named Limpy tries to become a mascot for which event?

The Sydney Olympics are Limpy's target in Morris Gleitzman's 1999 book, whose hero is trying to stop humans flattening his relatives on the highway.

Which small Australian natives can kill cane toads because the toad's poison does not harm them?

Meat ants win because a cane toad's instinct is to stand still and wait for its poison to work, which only gives the ants time to attack.

The film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History faked a road-kill scene using what in place of toads?

Potatoes filmed from a distance passed for toads on the road, because director Mark Lewis avoided harming any wildlife while making the film.

The Cane Toad Times was a satirical humour magazine published in which Australian state capital?

Brisbane was home to the magazine, whose title borrows the nickname other Australians give to people from Queensland.

The Embera-Wounaan people traditionally milked cane toads for toxin to coat which hunting weapons?

Arrows tipped with the milked toxin were used within the toad's natural range, and the Olmec may have taken the same secretions as a ritual drug.

Florida's cane toads took hold after an importer let about 100 loose at which sort of place?

An airport in Miami was the release point in the 1950s, and nobody is sure it was an accident. Earlier releases, meant to protect the state's sugar crops, had all died out.

Which native Australian mammal learned within two years to flip cane toads and eat the safe organs?

Rakali, a native water rodent, pick the biggest toads and cut out the poisonous gallbladder before dining with what researchers called surgical precision.

In parts of which South American country are cane toads eaten once the skin and glands are removed?

Peru has places where the toad is hunted for food. The careful preparation matters, because people have died after eating cane toads.

Western Australia banned which household antiseptic as a cane toad killer to protect other wildlife?

Dettol kills small toads almost instantly, but the state's environment department barred it in 2009 over fears that it was harming the environment.

Apparent cane toad success against sugar pests on which Caribbean island inspired Pacific releases?

Puerto Rico saw its white grubs collapse after the toads arrived, and a Nature article credited the toads with saving the sugar crop. Record rainfall may have done some of the work.

Australia's hopes for the cane toad followed an earlier win, when a moth tamed which invasive plant?

Prickly pear had been brought under control by the moth Cactoblastis cactorum, and sugar scientists hoped a toad could repeat the trick in the cane fields.

Some Australian snakes have reportedly evolved which trait since cane toads invaded their range?

Smaller jaws mean a snake can only manage little toads, which carry far less poison than the big ones that would kill it.