Cane Toad
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free Cane Toad trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few animals have a reputation like the cane toad. Shipped around the world as a living pesticide, it ignored the job it was hired for, bred by the million and became one of the most studied invaders on the planet. Along the way it picked up a film career, a place in Australian slang and a list of side jobs nobody saw coming. This quiz turns the best fun facts about cane toads into questions: where the toad really comes from, how its poison works, which native animals have learned to beat it, and how scientists are trying to slow its march. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the story sticks even when a guess misses. It suits trivia fans, teachers building a lesson on invasive species, and anyone who has met one of these heavyweights in the garden.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What nickname did rangers give the 2.7 kg cane toad found in Queensland's Conway National Park?
Toadzilla
Toadzilla, a female about 25 cm long, may be the biggest cane toad ever seen. She was preserved for display at the Queensland Museum.
Q 02Mid-20th-century doctors injected a patient's urine into male cane toads to detect which condition?
Pregnancy
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.
Q 03About one in ten cane toads at the front of Australia's invasion has developed which ailment?
Arthritis
Arthritis is the price of speed. Toads on the frontier have evolved longer legs, bigger bodies and faster movement than the ones left behind.
Q 04Australia's cane toads all descend from roughly how many animals shipped in for the first release?
About 100
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.
Q 05Among the world's true toads, the cane toad is considered the champion in which category?
Largest
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.
Q 06Which household pets are most often poisoned by cane toads, usually after licking or biting one?
Dogs
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.
Q 07Which clever Australian birds flip cane toads onto their backs with their beaks to eat them safely?
Crows
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.
Q 08At pub cane toad races in Australia, the winning punter is commonly expected to do what to the toad?
Kiss it
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.
Q 09Which animated series spoofed the cane toad plague with a pet bullfrog that overruns Australia?
The Simpsons
The Simpsons did it in the episode Bart vs. Australia, where the escaped frog's descendants take over the country and destroy its crops.
Q 10Cane toads were released in Queensland's sugar fields to eat which insects that were ruining crops?
Beetles
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.
Q 11According to an old myth, handling a cane toad or any other toad gives a person which skin problem?
Warts
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.
Q 12Cane toads failed as pest control in Australian sugar fields partly because they are poor at what?
Climbing
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.
Q 13Besides oozing poison, how does a cornered cane toad try to scare off a predator?
Puffs itself up
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.
Q 21A female cane toad lays thousands of eggs at once in which form?
Long strings of jelly
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.
Q 22What is the name of the milky-white poison that a threatened cane toad secretes from its glands?
Bufotoxin
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.
Q 23Carl Linnaeus named the cane toad after a mistaken belief that the animal also lived where?
The sea
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.
Q 14Where on a cane toad's body are the large parotoid glands that ooze its milky poison?
Behind the eyes
Behind the eyes, one bulging gland sits on each shoulder. Young toads lack these big glands, so they are usually less poisonous than adults.
Q 15Cane toad tadpoles in Australia have evolved an unusually strong appetite for which food?
Their own kind
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.
Q 16In Western Australia, scientists fed native predators nausea-laced cane toad meat shaped as what?
Sausages
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.
Q 17The cane toad is an invader in Florida, but in which US state is the cane toad a native animal?
Texas
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.
Q 18Most frogs only spot prey that moves, but cane toads can also track down food using which sense?
Smell
Smell helps a cane toad find meals that never move. Its menu includes pet food left outside and household rubbish.
Q 19In Trinidad the cane toad is called a crapaud, which is simply the word for toad in which language?
French
French gave Trinidadian English the word crapaud. Elsewhere the same animal goes by giant toad, Dominican toad or giant neotropical toad.
Q 20The first cane toads released in Australia were shipped in from which Pacific island group?
Hawaii
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.
Q 24Which carnivorous Australian marsupial has gone locally extinct in places after eating cane toads?
Northern quoll
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.
Q 25Cane toads marched into the wetlands of which heritage-listed park in the Northern Territory?
Kakadu
Kakadu was reached in March 2001. The park's risk assessment named native wildlife eating the toads as the greatest danger to its biodiversity.
Q 26Australian law puts a cane toad skin chemical in the same drug schedule as which substances?
Heroin and LSD
Heroin and LSD share Schedule 9 with the toad chemical, which is thought to cause mild hallucinations that last less than an hour.
Q 27Which big Australian lizards are fed small 'teacher' cane toads so they learn to avoid adults?
Goannas
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%.
Q 28In State of Origin rugby league, Queensland are the Cane Toads; what are New South Wales called?
Cockroaches
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.
Q 29In the children's novel Toad Rage, a cane toad named Limpy tries to become a mascot for which event?
The Sydney Olympics
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.
Q 30Which small Australian natives can kill cane toads because the toad's poison does not harm them?
Meat ants
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.