March 27, 2007
The Associated Press is reporting in breaking news dispatches this morning that the environmental group Frogwatch has found a toad the size of a small dog. They captured the 15-inch-long cane toad (Bufo marinus) during a raid on a pond outside the northern city of Darwin, Australia, late Monday, March 26, 2007.
Frogwatch says the toad is the size of a football (they don’t identify what kind, but the Australian organization’s spokesperson is probably talking about what we Americans call a “soccer ball.”) The toad weighs 2 pounds, and is among the largest specimens ever captured in Australia, according to Frogwatch coordinator Graeme Sawyer.
It’s huge, to put it mildly. The biggest toads are usually females but this one was a rampant male … I would hate to meet his big sister.Graeme Sawyer
The toxic cane toads were imported from South America during the 1930s in a failed attempt to control beetles on Australia’s northern sugar cane plantations. (A similar cane toad problem has developed in the recent past in Florida.) The poisonous toads have proven fatal to Australia’s delicate ecosystems, killing millions of native animals from snakes to the small crocodiles that eat them. Frogwatch’s “Toad Buster” project is dedicated to wiping them out.
We kill them with carbon dioxide gas, stockpile them in a big freezer and then put them through a liquid fertilizer process [which results in a product that is nontoxic.] It turns out to be sensational fertilizer. Graeme Sawyer
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Filed under Breaking News, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoology, Out of Place, Pop Culture