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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Here's a fun example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

In 2023, rangers discovered a female cane toad in Conway National Park in north Queensland which, recorded unofficially at 25 cm and 2.7 kg and dubbed 'Toadzilla', may be the largest ever seen.

Uh, that's a big toad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

Well, I'd certainly never heard of this before, but I am still wondering, after quickly skimming the article, what the catastrophe is.
This also might depend on your definition of what a catastrophe is, but I guess I'm referring to large loss of human life, or drastically decreased living conditions for tens of thousands of humans, as the end-result of an event like this in order for me to consider it a catastrophe.

It has been fairly devastating. I grew up camping around Australia's top end, across the Litchfield tabletop plateau and Kakadu escarpment and floodplains. True frontier country. Before the cane toads made their way up from Queensland, we often saw quolls poking around the firelight edge. When the cane toads first arrived, they were scarily thick on the ground, you couldn't go for a piss in the night without seeing four of them (and this is in remote, wild areas -- not constrained to places with human activity). You see fewer cane toads now, since the monitors, kites and wedgies learned to flip them over and eat them safely, but I never saw a quoll again.

I am perpetually surprised by how many of your animals sound fictional.

He’s using colourful nicknames, I believe- wedgies are probably wedge tailed eagles, for example.

Australia’s got a whole continuum of them.

Cane toads, as you observed, mostly poisoned dogs and local wildlife. They’re also notorious as speed bumps for cars. I get the impression that more speculative harms (ecological collapse, cattle diseases) are scientists fishing for a justification.

Rabbits: erosion, which matters a little more for countries relying on grazing animals. Serious enough that the government built a fence across the continent to slow them down. There were obvious upsides in terms of meat and pelts, though.

There’s also a Dingo Fence! I mention it mostly as evidence that predator populations are worth keeping out. Also, it’s the only time I’ve seen native populations blamed for introducing a species.

All in all, we’re not terrible at mitigating the direct economic consequences. But is that really a worthy goal? Letting an annoying, messy species tile the continent just because it doesn’t do enough damage to get a corporation involved? There’s something sad about a decline so slow, so soft, that it can’t be called a catastrophe.

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