Poisonous Toads

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cane toads

The cane toad is a large, poisonous toad that is from Central America and South America. It has other names; bufo marinus, giant neotropical toad, and marine toad. It has a diet of things either dead or living. The cane toad has a ravenous apetite, and is used as agricultural pest control in some islands like the Pacific and Carribean islands. However, the cane toads are actually pests in the regions, because its toxic skin kills native animals if eaten. Along with getting rid of pests and insects, they poisoned farmers' pets and animals. The cane toad gets its name from the pests that it was supposed to eat for agricultural purposes, the "greyback cane beetle".

Cane toads are very large. The females are bigger than males! The average adult cane toad may be about 4-6 inches, or 10-15 centimeters in length. However, the largest record cane toad was 15 inches, 38 centimeters, long, and weighed 2.65 kilograms - 5.8 pounds! An adult's skin (if you dare touch it) is dry and warty (but the young cane toad's skin is smooth and dark, sometimes red). It has unusual ridges above its eyes which run along it's snout, and the irises of their eyes are golden. A cane toad's possible colors varies: they can be gray, brown, red-brown, or olive with different patterns. It's ventral surface (around the stomach area) is usually cream, sometimes with smudges of black or brown. Young cane toads are less dangerous because they don't have the parotoid glands (which form warty masses near the ear).

Adult cane toads are very poisonous. They have bigger parotoid glands behind the eyes, as well as some glands on their backs. These glands release a dangerous, milky-white substance called bufotoxin when a cane toad is threatened. To scare off a predator, it puffs up and lifts off the ground to appear bigger. There are many cases in which an animal or even a human has died because they swallowed a cane toad. The bufotoxin that a cane toad releases has components that are toxic to animals. Under Australian laws, Bufotenin, one of the dangerous components that the cane toad releases when threatened, is considered a Class 1 drug! This means that bufotenin is as dangerous as heroin and marijuana, because they are all in the same classification!! If the cane toad licks anyone/anything, it coud fall seriously ill or might even die.

The cane toad is native to America. It lives in many different places: from the Rio Grande Valley to central Amazon. Its environments can be tropical and semi-arid. In Australia, they have about 1,000 - 2,000 adults in one area, and they were brought there to eat pests, the Cane grubs. They were also sent to many different places to control populations of different pests:

white grubs
rats
hawk moth larvae
Cane grubs
greyback cane beetle

The cane toad was successful in getting rid of white-grubs, whose populations decreased dramatically. The cane toad was also introduced to different places, like Australia, Florida, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, Fiji, the Philippines, the Ogasawara, and islands of Japan.