Australia's Invasive Cane Toads Have Evolved To Hop Even Faster | Popular Science - 0 views
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Cane toads in Australia have evolved to hop straighter and farther than ever before, Australia's ABC News reports. That means they're spreading faster than ever through Australia, sparking worries that they'll harm native species in places where they've never lived before. Twenty-six years after the debut of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, it seems scientists are still struggling to control the large, poisonous toad.
Sugar growers released cane toads, which are native to Brazil, in Australia in 1935. They wanted the toads to eat cane beetles, a sugarcane pest. However, cane toads didn't eat cane beetles; instead they began killing off native species such as lizards and crocodiles, which would die after eating the toads. Sometime in the 1990s, a quirky documentary reporting on the cane toads' effects in Australia became popular-and made the chubby amphibians into the international poster children for what can go wrong with introduced species.
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Being non-native, the fish present a threat to other life in the lake.
"Goldfish are not a native species and are very harmful to the local aquatic ecosystem," said Kristin Cannon, district wildlife manager for Boulder, Colo., in a press release. "We strongly encourage the public not to dump their unwanted pet fish in our waters. It is bad for our environment as well as illegal."