(stolen from the Good Weekend)The story of the giant cane toad introduced to Queensland from Hawaii in june 1935, to fight a pest of the sugar crop: the cane beetle. One hundred and two toads came by ship to Gordonvale, Queensland. They bred enthusiatiscally and two months later, when they were released in sugar growing areas, they numbered 3,000. They ate moths, plants, lizards, frogs, fish, mice, household waste - virtually every small thing except the cane beetle, which lived on the cane, where the toads could not reach it, or in fields without ground cover, where the frogs have no reason to go...
Eastern Australia is now home to 200 million cane toads...
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