Do Go On - 349 - Cane Toads and Other Terrible Decisions with Animals

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

This week we look at the disastrous decision to introduce cane toads to "take care" of cane beetles in Northern Queensland. But they're not the first introduced species to run amuck; possums, lizards, fish and birds... turns out humans have been making bad decisions for centuries!Support the show and get rewards like bonus episodes: dogoonpod.com or patreon.com/DoGoOnPodSee us live in Sydney in September and Book Cheat live in London: https://dogoonpod.com/live-shows/ Submit a topic idea: dogoonpod.com/suggest-a-topic/ Our merch: https://do-go-on-podcast.creator-spring.com/Cass and Jackson's podcasts: https://www.sanspantsradio.com/ Twitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: [e-mail] Our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/ Our awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader Thomas REFERENCES:https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/1803 https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Threats-to-Wildlife/Invasive-Species  https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/wild-rabbits/ https://www.wwf.org.au/news/blogs/10-facts-about-cane-toads#gs.2i6ize https://pestsmart.org.au/toolkit-resource/how-did-the-cane-toad-arrive-in-australia/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serenjai Amarna, 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there.

Canada, we are visiting you in September this year. If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. Welcome to another episode of Do Go One. My name is Dave Warnackie and as always I'm here with Matt Stewart.

Hey Dave, how's it going? Good, thanks. How are you? Yeah, good. Good to be here at the San's Pants headquarters. Can you believe it? Yes, look at this. We're looking around the room.

Oh, it's fantastic. It's beautiful. There's foliage in it. There's plants. Yeah. There's a 2007 podcast award. That's right. 2017.

2007 was an ost. 2007 Not Sure Podcasts were real You didn't let me finish 2007 podcast award teen Okay I said that in a funny order didn't I No I don't think so

I think that I'm sorry you meant That's pretty normal order to me Super normal But who are these fantastic voices Well sadly Jess Perkins couldn't be with us this week And it takes not one but two people to replace me Yeah that's true

We are joined by our Sanspans radio friends Caspades and Jackson Bailey Thank you so much having us. You both take up one part of Jess. Top off or bottom off? Yeah, which half of you? I want to go top off.

Oh, no. No. Honestly, Jess is her powerful leg. She's got very powerful legs. She's got very powerful legs. She can leg press like a boulder. If you're over in trouble, you want her to be around. And as long as that trouble is a boulder on top of you, because she will be able to just kick it

Oh, that's cool. Although the top half does have the laugh, which is the other most famous. Oh, okay. Hey, you suck shit. I'll suck shit off the boulder. Okay. All right. Also got Jess's wit there.

Appreciate that. Well, in Cass's defense, she's only the legs. I can't be expected to do a head's job. A head's job. Hey, Dave. It's been a while since Jackson's been on the show. And a little while since Cass has been on the show. Do you want to explain to them how it all works?

Yeah. Well, what we do here, Jackson, to a lesser extent cast, is taking turns to report on a topic, often suggested to us by one of the listeners. We go away, do a little bit of research, and bring it back to the group in the form of a report. It is my turn to do that this week. Fabulous.

I'm going to tell you about a topic, and to get us onto that topic, I always ask a question. Okay. And I often sometimes get them right. Yeah, sort of brag. But there is a listener out there keeping a leader tally. Oof.

So you could get on the way. Oh, yeah. I could chart. That's exciting. Oh, hell yeah. You'd instantly be in the top five, I reckon. Okay. My question to you is, what was introduced near Cairns in 1935, reached Brisbane in 1945,

the Northern Territory in 1990. English backpackers. They didn't make it to W.A. until 2009. That's got to be the cane toad. It is the cane toad. Oh. Sorry, Jackson. That is, that's fun because before the episode, Dave said this is a real, got a real Jackson Bailey energy.

Doesn't mean that introduced pests? No, that's, I'm all over it. I love cane toads. You can't let a dog eat them? Yeah. It just feels like something that Jackson would be interested in. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a house up, up kind of north, and it was full of cane toads. And my brother would just collect, like, heaps of them in a bucket and just carry them around.

I knew that this would appear. I don't know how I knew. And it was like, you shouldn't be touching cane toads, but he would just pick them up bodily and they would chase the cat. Yeah, hell yeah. The cane toads are chased the cat. Yeah, yeah. The cat knew they were poison.

As a truth, if you lick him, you get like a hallucinogenic. I think you might just get sick. I will be addressing that later on. Because I wanted to know more about them because, yeah, I know you can't eat them. Yeah. You can't let other animals eat them. But what, is touch and allow? What if I give him a little kiss?

What if it's been good? It could be a little prince under there. You never know. Just for the record, I would have also accepted giant neotropical toad. Oh, okay. Or the marine toad, which are also cool names. Is this the same name for the same guy? Yeah.

Why is he the marine toad? He ever in the sea? Yeah. I guess we'll find out. Naval captain. They come from the water. They do. On this episode, we're going to talk about canoes and other terrible decisions to introduce species around the world.

And there's been lots of them. Oh, dear. So strap in, here we go. invasive species are among the leading threats to native wildlife. According to the National Wildlife Federation, approximately 42% of threatened or endangered species are at risk due to invasive species. Does feel a little bit, you know, hypocritical for us, European backgrounds in Australia, like, oh, these fucking introduced species.

Oh, God. Jackson often brings up, imagine if we didn't introduce any new species. And if instead of bringing them over, they were like, oh, we'll just domesticate the ones that are here. Yeah, I think I remember reading somewhere online, they were like, we could have theoretically domesticated the quall. You know, the quall? They were like, that would, if we'd give it the time, we probably could have sorted that out. But instead we went for cats. Oh, qualls are great.

And little grabby hands. Oh, delightful. Imagine having a little grabby-handed pet. Oh, my God. No, I don't like any hand with any creature. I don't like raccoons because I got thumps and stresses me. We can open locks and use keys and stuff. But in your world, we never would have introduced raccoons.

That's true. It's true. I actually read in a couple of places, some articles that were like, but really, the most invasive species is humans. That would have been funny if I feel like that. I love that. That's great. We're an invasive species right now.

I reckon actually the most dangerous animal of all is human. Wrong, bear. But these invasive species are. also affect humans by damaging natural ecosystems and cost economies, billions of dollars per year. But yeah, it is humans that colonize and destroy our own planet. And the spread of most of these species are often because of humans, sometimes unintentionally. We'll say again from the National Wildlife Federation, the NWF. People and the goods we use travel around the world very quickly, and they often carry

unadvited species with them. Ships can carry aquatic organisms in their ballast waters, while smaller boats. must, may carry them on their propellers. Oh. Oh. Yeah, they're hitching a ride. A little guy holding on getting the most dizzies ever been in his life. They'd want to have some grabby hands.

Yeah, if you were a mollusk and you'd go on to the hull of the ship and you watch another mollusk go on the propeller, and you'd be happy with your choice. Yeah. But you'd come out of it, be like, whoa, I'm the dizziest anyone's ever been in their entire life. Huh, this place looks really weird. It'll go back to normal soon. Yeah, yeah.

Two days later, you're like, I, I don't think it was the spinning. I think something else happened here. Can a mollusk get dizzy even? How do you get dizzy? You need ears. I thought you needed eyes. I think Dave will get into this soon. That's part of your report.

I think just in case, when you spin a propeller, in case there's something attached, it should then spin the other direction to the same amount of time. To balance them out, yeah. Just in case they're feeling that. Reverse the boat up, yeah. I've always found that helps me if I'm dizzy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You stand up and you stand up and you stand up.

once in the other direction. I find the older I get, the dizzier I get. Yeah, you're not doing spinnies. You're losing your tolerance for it. Yeah, I think I am. Yeah, that's right. You've got to train every day. I've been getting dizzy coming off the walking desk.

That rule. I'm doing walking desk, so you stare at the computer and your legs are moving really, really fast because you get excited about the work you're doing. And then you step off and your legs are like, I'm going. And your brain's like, I have been still. Sometimes I get head spins if I'm having a hot bath and then I stand up to have a shower to like, you know, to refresh or whatever. That's blood pressure.

Yeah, and then I'm like, well, I'm going to fall over. It happens basically every night. You have a bath? Every night, you have a hot bath and have to stand up for the chair. Do you shower after bath? Well, it's like to just like wash away. I shower before bath. No, because if you have a bath, you're sitting in your own grime.

No, that's why I shower before bath. Well, it doesn't either way. But then I have the big soaking clean and nice oils and I come out and I'm oiled. Different strokes for different folks. Well, I guess both of us have our own beauty to the methods in which we move through this. All I'm hearing is a lot of bragging about having a bath. And I'm feeling jealous right now. You love a bath, but you're...

I'm living bathless. Oh, that's tragic. This is when I was house-sting. I only just got into baths in one of the lockdown. Yeah. And then I moved to a bathless place. Bards a king. It's, oh, it's the best way to get clean.

I'm... No. I will live with a bath again. You just really specifically. this data that you can't get clean in a bath, stop. It's a good way to wind down after you are clean. That's true. Maybe I'm not too friendly against Jackson's arguments.

It makes a lot of sense, Cass, that you work at a walking desk as Jess Perkins's legs. Yeah, well, I've got to get strong for her. Do it for Jess. So some invasive species are intentionally or accidentally released pets, for example. Burmese, Python's becoming a big problem in the Everglades in Florida. Oh, yeah. It's possible that up to... 300,000 pythons now inhabit

southern Florida. Which is terrifying. That's so scary. They're pythons. That's almost the population of Wyoming. Closing in. They're coming for them. But the pythons, I reckon,

oh, yeah, no, they're still going to be eating stuff. They're eating frogs and stuff. Yeah, they eat lots of stuff apparently. And they're very hard to find. They hide very well. Yeah, that would be annoying. But they're not a tacky. Yeah, that's true.

They're just going to eat little animals. And then they just, They just swallow them whole. They're not venomous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just going to be chilling out, terrified because they're used to life indoors. Yeah. They're just scared little guys trying to eat a little possum.

But those examples I've been through there, they're kind of accidents. But not always. What we're going to focus on today is animals that were intentionally introduced by humans into new habitats. And people have been doing that for a while now. In fact, in the 19th and 20th centuries, acclimatization societies began to grow in popularity. These were voluntary associations in the 19th and 20th centuries that encouraged the introduction of non-native species. Huh.

Why? Well, the first one was founded in Paris in 1854. And basically, it was, you know, Europeans colonising and now dominating new areas of the world going, I don't like the stuff here. And there's foxes. Rather than going back to their original. Yeah, rather than going home, they were like, let's bring home to the world. to this new place.

Okay. Here in Victoria, Australia, the Victorian Acclimatization Society was founded in 1861 by Edward Wilson as an offshoot of the Victorian Zoological Society. Wilson was a journalist

and a private collector whose motto was, quote, if it lives, we want it. No dead animals. It's so snappy. Hell yeah. Amazing.

But I guess, like, if you're living in a, like right now I know if I put like a lion in the middle of the, say, outback, is probably going to die. But maybe back then you would be like... Let's see what happens.

Yeah, like, maybe it won't. Maybe the result is we'll have lions now, and that'll be cool. I see where they're coming from. I imagine, without all the knowledge we have now, that has come from doing things like this, you'd be like, lion in the outback, you're like, oh, same colour.

I reckon he'd do pretty well out there. Lion, like, hot. Does it hot? Yeah, it doesn't hot. Yeah, it's a lot. Probably won't affect the animals that are already there. Yeah. They live together.

He'll be like, oh, well, he's got food. Yeah, you can eat a kangaroo or whatever. That's probably better because he can eat one thing, oh, this is going to make that lion's life great. And then didn't that actually happen with camels? Like we put camels in the outback and they thrive. Oh, yeah, we export camels to other countries. They love it here.

Yeah, it's like, are you going to talk about this? No, there's so many incidents I couldn't go through them all, but there's now like a million camels in the Central Australia. Is it the biggest population of wild camels in the world? Yeah. And we do like sell some camels, but it's only like 5% of them a year or something. No really. Just they breed at such an alarming rate.

That's crazy. I can't imagine a camel mating. We can't sell enough camels. Humping a hump. I once went to Central Australia and we went on a little camel ride. And we went back to the place where they kept other camels and the people who own the place were telling us about them. They're like, this camel just came to us. And there was so many wild camels that this one.

saw the sweet set up and was like, I want in and just came up and was like, I live here now. It domesticated itself like a cat that rules. I don't know what kind of camel conversations that were having, but I think that's always like, yeah, they just feed us. It's like, what? Whoa. It's like, yeah, you get people writing on you. It was like, man, who cares?

Who cares? Some of them did get angry. Some of them hated being written and I felt very bad. I'm like, put them back. This one hates it. Yeah, there's so many. Get the domesticating one in. Yeah.

Hold auditions. Yeah, exactly. Get the good camels. You might as well. You got the, yeah, you're spoiled for choice. Yeah. So it was nice to know they treat them so well that camel was like, one for me, please.

I live here now. The Aclimatization Society in Victoria was governed by the colony's most eminent scientists who believed that Australia's plants and animals were greatly inferior to those in Europe. So that's what, that's their theory. That was a scientist. The most eminent scientists. I cannot imagine looking at a kangaroo and thinking it was inferior to anything. Yeah, that's right.

I know. The Australian animals are amazing. We have some of the most unique. They thought our animals were joke animals. They were like, that can't be real. Yeah, like, when you bring your platyples back, they were like, you've sewed two animals together here. They tried to pull a big part.

And being a scientist and not realizing that they would have evolved to inhabit this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, perfectly. My God. Australian writer Eric Rolls wrote in 1984, quote, there was never a body of men so foolishly, so vigorously. vigorously and so disastrously wrong. Whoops.

But according to museums, Victoria, founder Edward Wilson was supported by Henry Barclay, a science patron and later the governor. The society was primarily responsible for the introduction of starlings, sparrows, and European carp into the Murray River, which has since become an incredible issue as they've massively degraded the river and the basin. Whoops. This is a grim topic, Dave. How do you get carp overseas? How do you get carp here? Fish tanks? Yeah, big tanks.

Like, we, because some of the, some stuff's already traveling in the ballast water down below. Oh, yeah, true, do you just dump some carp in there. Yeah, have a bit more. Yeah, fair enough. I think you don't need that many. Oh, yeah, true, true, true. Yeah, now it's horrible. Start up with two.

Yeah. And you probably bring eggs. Maybe they can, like, freeze eggs or something. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. As a scientist, I'll build this one. Our most eminent science.

Yeah. The principle of acclimatization involved transporting fauna from other places in the world to see which animals could adapt and be integrated into a new environment. So we're talking blackbirds. They tried pheasants, quail, salmon, camels, goats and sheep. They're all brought first to the Melbourne Zoo and then introduced into the Australian environment. Many of these species did not establish in the Australian landscapes. Yeah.

We cool if we add pheasants. Fessons are cool. I mean, obviously tragic and probably would come with untold problems. But I can't see their thinking too easily. Yeah, fuzzins would be serious. Put them in. Well, maybe, I feel like I'm not giving these people enough credit for having things. But maybe they're looking at things and being like, oh, I don't know if we can eat that.

Yeah, okay. But no one checked. Like, they're not looking at kangaroos being like, oh, we'll just eat those then. There were people here. They could have checked. Yeah. People were eating them currently. Could have let them know.

I know the same thing happened when the pilgrims first came to America. The pilgrims were like, no, we're eating our disgusting, disgusting British. freaking milk porridge or whatever, and all the First Nations, American people were like, yeah, we're eating like, we've got all these delicious foods. Turkey,

and they're like, no, no, no, no. Corn and, yeah, I've, I like my canned food. Thank you. Yeah, they had like the three sisters growing system with, like, was it corn and then the, oh yeah, yeah, whatever the other two vegetables were, yeah.

But they grow perfectly together and then you get delicious meals. Yeah, yeah. That is so good for you. But, In fairness for these people, the acclimatization wasn't just a one-way exercise. The society also sent echiners to London, wombats to Paris, kangaroos to Mauritius, and possums to New Zealand.

They were hoping to use the possum as a source of food and fibre and fur pelts for clothing. Possums are now widespread across Mass of New Zealand and have had a significant impact on many of the local natural ecosystems. Yeah, you're allowed to kill the possums in New Zealand. Yeah, they'll sell a lot of possum skin merch. and all their shops over there. All of their shops. All of their shops.

In the 1980s, the population peaked at 60 to 70 million possum. Oh, my God. Far out. That's way more than the population of Wyoming. Yeah, how many dozen possums does each person of Wyoming have to kill? To take down this from. We get everybody from Wyoming into New Zealand with one goal in mind. How did they, do we know how the echidnas and what, I mean, I know presumably not well

because it's not like a bunch of a kidders in Britain or whatever. But like it does feel like unless it became a problem, that means they didn't do well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. Imagine just having, because London, there's not enough places for them to borrow. Yeah. So I can immediately see some problems. But imagine if they'd become like, I don't know, a little street echidness.

You know, burrowing into holes in buildings that mice had previously dug out. And then the caves have gotten too big for the mice to feel safe in. You know, like a pest. Yeah, it's like native Australian animals, only some of them have really adapted to the suburban sprawls. Yeah, yeah. Possums are everywhere. Yeah, true. But you don't see a lot of echidnas.

For me, favourite Aussie animal, native animal? Oh. Wombat. I think I'm a koala man. They're great. I'd say wombat too, but echidna for me, just seeing them how they sort of, they wumble along, kind of like a wombat. Yeah, I love an akina too. Oh, yeah.

Kittan is great. Because a couple of times I saw them in my house growing up, and, you know, they are in, you know, it's semi-supervia, they're pretty suburban, and they're wandering around. But the look of not giving a shit, because they're like, come at me. You can't touch me. I'm covered in spikes, idiots. They would have learned so quickly.

People like, oh, I can't touch you. They're like, yeah. Your brother picks him up, doesn't he? Yeah, my brother, he picks him up. Put them in a bucket? He just digs his hands underneath and pulls them out of the earth. A fun thing you do, if you ever seen a kid, no, obviously the first thing they do is they just like borrow down and hunker down.

But if you just stand very still, eventually the echidon is like, I guess they're gone. And then just starts walking away and you can watch it for ages. They're so funny. They love how all they care about is getting their little ants and stuff. They'll just like nose to the ground, like sniffing for truffles or something. They couldn't care less about you. Oh yeah.

They were all. Great animal. Yeah, a fantastic animal. Fantastic animal. I do love how wombats are like Jess Perkins' legs. So solid, so strong. Thankfully, I don't know anyone this has happened to personally. but if you've got an international listener,

if you hit a wombat with your car, people are like, fuck, are you okay? Yeah, I've been in a car that hit a wombat, and the wombat was fine, but we had to pull into a car park, and it was like it hit a rock, and the underside of the car was just destroyed.

They are so solid. I love nugget animals. Yeah, the wombat would, whatever, we just kept walking. I used to want a pet wombat when I was younger, and I looked it up to see what you could do, and there were all these websites where they're like, adopt a wombat,

and I'm like, this is a cartoon that an artist has put a lot of work into. I just giving the money to wombat sanctuaries. Found out that you can adopt baby wombats that have been orphaned. Oh yeah. But once they hit heat, then they get release into the wild. So you literally only get them for the cute phase of their life. That rules.

And I was like, I'll do that. I'll, like, nurse a wombat to make sure it's healthy and, like, be in the wild. But I don't, my home wasn't set up well enough. And then I moved out into an apartment. I'm like, no, I can't keep a wombat in an apartment. I've never lived in a wombat safe house. You put that on the lease? Oh, I've got a wombat.

I hope that's okay. I reckon if you own a native animal and someone comes in on your house inspection day and they're like, why is there a wombat in here? You're like, he came in and honestly, they're scary, right? And hopefully the person's like, yeah, they're pretty scary. Have you heard what happens when you're hidden with your car?

I have just waiting from to leave. Yeah, well, it's actually been here longer than us. So really, if anything, where we should go. We should go. This is his house. He lives here. So apologies to the New Zealanders about the possums. So sorry about that.

But back in Australia, six rabbits had been brought over by the first fleet in 1788. But the godfather of rabbits in Australia, as I assume, he demanded to be called. Oh, yeah. It was a guy called Thomas Austin. It was a hunter and a member of the Acclimatization Society who spoke about. Good. In 1859, he introduced 12 pairs of rabbits, hoping to hunt them for spanish. bought on his property, Barwin Park at Winchell Sea in Victoria's Western District.

Rabbits are able to produce tenfold in one season and a website called Australian Food Timeline, which I'm a big fan of. Oh, hell yeah. Right, so just seven years after Austin introduced the rabbits at his property, he received a visit from Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria. A report in the illustrated Australian news recounted that the prince shot 416 rabbits in three and a half hours and his gun became so hot that they blistered the hands of the loader.

The load of a separate person. Yeah. There's someone else. It seriously is. Someone else is lighting his gun. That's so funny. So he couldn't miss, basically. It was like in a bowl pit, a bunny pit.

Oh my God. And then some poor guys saying, Your Majesty, it's burning my hands. You've killed enough. You can't eat all of these before they go bad. This is a time where it probably took five minutes to reload the gun. So he'd only have fired, four bullets in that time and killed 400 rabbits.

So they were everywhere in just a few years. Rabbits were introduced around the country different places over the decades after, but that was the epicentre. But the 1920s, there were more than 10 billion rabbits across Australia. Man, you've said so many Wyoming. Thomas Austin was praised during his lifetime for bringing these rabbits, but has copped a lot of flack for the rabbit since, I will say.

his widow, has been interesting to Melbourne eyes, Elizabeth Austin founded what would become the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. Oh, wow. Cool. That's a better contribution. She's got a better reputation. They're balanced out, maybe. Do we think they're balanced out? I don't know. The native animals probably don't think so.

The native animals probably don't think so, but I reckon a lot of people's lives would have been saying. I reckon a bit for help. Bloody hell, you reckon? Maybe. So when the prince came, apparently I read that they were a bit embarrassed because their mansion wasn't mansiony enough. Oh, yeah. So after he left, they built an even bigger mansion in case he ever came back. But then within the year, Thomas himself died.

So he never got to appreciate the Royalty. Yeah. He had the second mansion on his massive property. And he also never got to appreciate the devastation that he alone called. Yeah, he never knew. So that's in Australia. In the USA, their Thomas Austin was a German. an immigrant named Eugene Sheffelin.

His grand idea was to bring one of every bird mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare to North America. How funny. To be, man, back in the old times, you could just have a maniac idea and then do it. Yeah, it's like, are you wealthy? Yes, you can do whatever you want. Fetch me a bird. And then other people have to figure out how to do that. How to get all the birds.

And that's about 60 birds. So there's things like wrens, cormorants, owls, nightingales, larks, all get a mention. often for dramatic purpose in the works of Shakespeare. But the one that really took off was the Starling. According to the BBC, one cold winter's day, Eugene released 60 starlings into New York Central Park in the hope that they would start breeding. And breed they did.

The US is now home to an estimated 200 million European starlings. And they are an horrific nuisance causing over a billion dollars of damage to crops every year. Wow. So much so that they are one of the few bird species unprotected by a lot. law in the United States. They're like, go for it. Oh, nuts. They're also potentially dangerous.

They're a particular problem at airports because they flock in very large numbers. And compared to other birds, their bodies are very dense. They're like the wombat of the skies. They've been known to cause bird strikes on planes. Bird strikes. Birds. Like a picket line? No, it's more when they get sucked into the engine.

Oh. That's so funny that there are some birds that if they get sucked to the engine, It's like, well, that wasn't a light, airy bird. Who cares? Come at me, who cares? These are like bowling balls with wimus. So do they just not have as hollow bones or something? Yeah, what's going on?

I don't know. Why they just feel of better meat? Too mussely. Like a factor. Yeah, what are they? Chunky like an owl or something? They sound little. They are quite small, but they flock in hundreds, sometimes thousands.

That's crazy. It's more of the... And they are solid compared to other birds their size. Oh, they're beautiful. Show us? Look at that. Oh, I get it. Once again, I understand why you did it.

Yeah, it's a beautiful bird. And it's a Shakespearean bird. You get it. Yeah, I'm there. Because there are things. When you go overseas, you'll see bits of scenery in nature and you're like, wow, the sky looks really different here. Oh, wow, I love the trees.

And then there are things I notice about like Australia. I'm like, God, I love, you know, X, Y, Z about how this country looks. And being a maniac back in the day and being like, I could get all the best bits at once. Yeah. You're like, I'm going to make a perfect country. This place does not have. beautiful birds. Or you get someone and you go,

it took ages to get here. I can't be bothered going back. Just bring the other stuff to me. I don't want to go back to England to see a fox. Whatever. Just I'll have a fox here. Let's have them here. It's that big deal.

But the Starlings, they caused the most deadly bird strike in US aviation history. In 1960, the birds flew into the engines of a plane as it took off from Boston's Logan Airport, causing the plane's engines to malfunction. They crashed into the harbor and 62 people were killed. Whoa.

Yeah. And this can all be traced back to this guy in Central Park being like, fly, my pretty. Just being like, it would be beautiful if I could read Shakespeare and like see the birds. And possibly the worst part of all of this is considering the damage is Starlings are only mentioned once in all of Shakespeare. Oh my God. It's not even like they're like his most popular bird, you know. They are in Henry IV, part one. Hot Spur is in rebellion against the king and thinking of ways to torment him.

And in act one scene two, he fantasizes about teaching a style. Starling to say Mortimer, one of the King's enemies, as Starlings are very good mimics. So you're trying to blame the guy who brought the Starlings. You know, I blame Shakespeare. Yeah. If he didn't write that verse. That's true. Yeah, it would never have happened.

I don't think he wrote it for Americans, though. I think he wrote it for people he lived with. Yeah, that's true. People who know Stalin's. Well, he should have known what could have happened. Yeah. It's a real sliding door's Shakespeare moment here. Do I pick Starlings?

or another bird. Yeah, the bald eagle. The ostrich. Well, so the line is, nay, I'll have a starling, shall be taught to speak, nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.

Poetry. That line's worth it. That line's worth the damage. I like that the starling in the in context with Shakespeare is also annoying. It's also in a negative line. And then, you know.

I'm going to drive someone crazy. I love how you understood what that sentence meant. Oh, yeah. Come on. I'm like, oh, gibberish. And you were just like, it sounded like English to you. Yeah, yeah, I'm a genius. I speak a bit of the spear.

Yeah, the bard. Was he actually a bard? Well. He's the bard. He's the bard. Like, as we know a bard today, was he annoying? Did he suck? Yeah, he's pretty annoying.

I've got into a lot of Americans who are harassed by starlings. Year after year. Australia has had its own fair share of terrible decisions to introduce birds, namely the minor bird. Oh, yeah. Screw that guy. And I feel bad because we do have a native minor bird. Yeah, that's true.

And sometimes people confuse them and get angry at them. I have done it in my past. We've gotten angry at the wrong bird. And then I felt awful. I'm like, sorry, sorry, you're doing everything right. You're not breaking anything weird. Yeah. I'm getting bad at the wrong bird.

So you have a hunt in packs as well. introduced ones. Yeah, so that's the common miner, and our ones are called the noisy minor. Yeah. They've changed it to common. It used to be called the Indian miners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're native to India and Southern Asia, and according to PetSmart, the common miner

are popular birds in their source countries as crop pest control agents, and as symbols of undying love associated with their habit of pairing for life. Oh, that's nice. Just not here. That's beautiful. I reckon as people put them in a bag and attach them to their exhaust. They think the same thing. They live together, now they're dying together.

Jeez. How do you turn it into the minor ball pit? Common winers were introduced to Melbourne in the 1860s to combat insects in market gardens. Okay. Now it's estimated the numbers have swelled to the millions in 1883 mines. Dave, could you put it in Wyoming population? Yeah. How many Wyoming? Like eight Wyoming?

Whoa. I should let everyone know that Dave told me the population of Wyoming today. I don't think you need to tell us. I think they do know. Our state of the day, Wyoming. Why did Wyoming even come? It doesn't matter. It is, yeah.

In 1883, miners were transported to Townsville in Queensland, a neighbouring sugar cane growing areas to combat locusts and cane beetles. Oh, here we go. A bit more on the cane beetles in a moment. I'll be coming back. But the common miner thrives in urban and suburban environments. In Canberra, for instance, 110 miners were. introduced between 68 and 71, and by 1991, common minor population density in Canberra average

15 birds per square kilometre. Whoa. That's too much. That's so many birds. And only three years later, a second study found that they'd have grown to 75 birds per square kilometer in the same area. But in Cairns, there's 200, sorry, in Canberra, there's now 250 per square kilometer. But in Cairns, there is a thousand minor birds per square k.

Whoa, so that's what, one per square meter? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. That's great. Oh my God. If they all landed at once, it would be terrible. It'd be offered Hitchcock's the birds.

It'd be full on the birds situation. Yeah. That's so many. That's horrendous. You think we could solve it by giving every citizen of Australia the appropriate amount of birds, like, but person? Yeah. And we can just do with them what we like.

That's right. Yeah, everyone's responsible for this certain amount of birds. Like the adopter highway sort of plan. You've adopted, I don't know, 60 odd birds or whatever. How big is your house? All right, you now have that minisquay media there is your bird. Do with them what you will, but they can't grow.

You can't let them out of your sight, basically. You don't have to, but if you've got a car exhaust pipe, you know, I'm not saying do it, but I'm not saying don't do it. That's a crazy government initiative. It's up to you. I wonder if, because our culling techniques are getting insane. Like, have you heard of the one they're using for mosquitoes? Or they're in development for mosquitoes?

I can't remember if it's approved yet. No. They are releasing mosquitoes that, that are infertile. Oh. Or have an infertility gene. So they release all these mosquitoes. They breed,

and then the next generations of mosquitoes can't breed anymore. Huh. That's clever. It's the next generation down becomes infertile. So they keep releasing these one generation of infertility mosquitoes to kill them off. We've got too many mosquitoes, do we? They just keep killing people.

I personally, I don't really like killing anything. Yeah, that's fair. Mosquito, I think that's fair game because it's not. first them. Yeah. I feel like mosquitoes kill people. If a mosquito could kill, if it could squash me, it would. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's fine. But how do you feel about when they go hunting for a shark that bit a surfer or something? Well, the surfer was in the shark's house. So I don't think that's a shark's fault. Are we not in the mosquitoes house? Yeah, that's true. If the mosquito's house, not. Yeah, and he's coming to get us.

So it's us first. If a shark bit me, I punched a shark in the nose. Right. And I'm not in the shark's house. No, that's true. I will kill a mosquito. What if the shark came into your house? Like in the bath.

Yeah, well, the shark would have to cop it if I killed him. That's fair. That's fair. That's fair. But if he came into my house with not intention to kill me, if you just wanted to have a look around and be like, have a look. Yeah. You know, mosquito comes and tries to bite me. He starts a fight. If anyone comes to your house and just wants to have a look around, you'll welcome them in.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. If I'm like, if I'm like, shut in the door and they're like, no, come in. And they're like, problem. I'm like, well, problem. But if I'm like, yeah, come into my house, it's fine. And if there's a problem, a problem will happen. I will be part of the problem. Anyway, can we get some of those infertility genes on the minor birds, maybe?

Because that, I like that because it's not culling them. Yeah, that's true. It just sort of getting rid of them. It won't kill any existing ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It will make them die out. True. Which is pretty horrific.

Maybe less horrific. They just keep destroying so much. Yes, they get to live lives without the, worry of kids. Yes. Don't birds have to teach their kid birds out of fliance of? These birds can just travel instead. Empty nesters.

Oh, love the space. Well, they're lifelong monogamous and sedentary. Breeding pairs use the same territory each year and maintain and defend their territory aggressively during breeding season. This behavior is thought to evict native bird species from nesting boxes or tree hollows and even kill eggs and chicks. Not so romantic now, are they? No.

They also carry avian malaria that kills local birds. Jesus. Oh, no. They are the mosquitoes of the sky. It's true. The mosquitoes with wings. But before we finally get to our main headline event, the cane toad, I hope you'll indulge to be talking about a lizard,

and not just any lizard, the Lazarus lizard. Oh. Called the Podarchus Morales or the Common Wall L lizard. lizard. They're from Europe originally. But they are referred to locally in the Cincinnati-slash-North Kentucky area as the Lazarus lizard, as it was introduced to the area around 1950 by George Rao, who was a member of the family who owned the Lazarus Department Store chain. Oh, okay.

Bought out by Macy's. When George was just 10 years old, his family went on vacation to northern Italy, and wanting a souvenir of the trip, the boy had stuffed around 10 lizards into the socks in his suitcase to bring home with him. My God. The lizards survived the trip, and he released them near his family's home

in the eastern Cincinnati suburb of Hyde Park, and they quickly bred and spread. This story became local legend, and George Rowe himself wrote a letter in 1989 to herpetologists at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, owning up to being the guy,

it introduced the lizards as a 10-year-old, and in 2013, genetic testing proved that he was telling the truth. That's amazing. They come from the area of Italy, and there's also, they think only three of the ten lizards survive to breed. So there's like a real bottleneck in their genetics. It all comes from these three and they're like, okay, the guy's not lying.

The lizards now number in the hundreds of thousands and are expanding and have become a local symbol found in murals on carousels. And the original neighbourhood they were introduced is often unofficially marked on maps as Lizard Hill in their honour. So they like them. Oracles have got into them. Yeah, is devastating these Lazarus lizard? I think they eat some stuff, yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I just thought it was so funny that a 10-year-old kid.

He's not expecting. I think there's so much that's funny about that. One, he's like, I need a souvenir. Ten lizards. That would be my souvenir. And then I love when he gets home. He's like, ah, I'm sick of these lizards. It just dumps him his yard.

Yeah, they're releasing them the insane bit. Surely one lizard. Yeah, one lizard's a perfect souvenir. Ten lizards is so many lizards. That's a heaps of lizards. How did he even pack that many socks? I'm surprised they survived the trip as well. Like Italy to America, that's a while.

Yeah. Don't some animals just turn off sometimes? I just like have an off switch. I'm dormant for a bit. I'm in socks. I'm in socks. Yeah, you put a lizard in a sock. It's like putting a blanket over a bird.

Yeah, it's night time. Good night. Do it with that? Does that work for us? I know that the sun affects our circadian rhythms, but like... What's your question? Are you saying if I put you in a cage and then put a sheet over it, would you go to sleep? Maybe.

No, what about, okay, in the Iceland? Yeah. Dark all the time. Uh-huh. Do they sleep for? I don't know. I don't know they have very high rates of depression. You probably get bored a lot more, yeah.

Yeah. You've been having you, Dave? Do you go there? So is that, is it dark at one point of the year and really light at the other time? Yeah, like up 24 hours. Yeah, the further north you go. Yeah, I think when I went, I went to Iceland, maybe there was only seven hours of sunshine for the whole day or something.

It was getting less and less. Sleep more or party more? I actually slept less. So one morning, we got there at night and I woke up the next day and for some reason I hadn't checked my phone to see what time it was. And I went downstairs and, you know, it was at a hotel with, you know, a continental breakfast. So I said to the guy, oh, you're serving breakfast yet? And I had to buzz the bell actually to get him down.

He was really grumpy and I was like, oh, this guy's really mad at me. And I was like, oh, where do I go for breakfast? He goes, oh, yeah, I'll be there in a minute. And I'm like, okay. I went back to my room and I realized that it was like 4.45 a.m. And I just buzzed him down to the death. I was like, oh, okay, sorry. Rise and shine.

Yeah, yeah. I didn't realize. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, but finally we get to the cane toad. Hell yes. Described by PetSmart as one of the foremost examples of an exotic animal release gone wrong. Oh, yeah. Hang on.

When's it gone right? Yeah. Some kangaroos in France is pretty cool. I will actually, in this story, talk about an example gone right. That's exciting. There are a couple. Honestly, they seem to be few and far between.

What about the dingo? Yeah, that's true. That went pretty well, right? Yeah, I mean, it happened so long ago that I think some people call them native. Yeah, but they were definitely introduced. They were from, like, East Timor, right? Yeah. Down into, down into, I didn't even knew that.

It was like a few thousand years ago, five thousand years ago. Yeah, yeah, a long time ago. I don't know really when, because people talk about that, that them being introduced, but I guess because we have so little idea of the, like, connection between Australia and kind of like Southeast Asia, we don't know who was trading what or whatever. Like, how did the thing go come from who? Yeah, it must have been, yeah, obviously on a, by a boat.

Yeah. Or did they swim? Yeah, just a swim. Yeah. They've affected doggy paddletle. I know there was a lot of trade between the people in the northern tip of Australia and the southern set of islands or whatever, where they would come down here from Southeast Asia to trade to collect sea cucumbers

and then the First Nations Australian people would help them farm the sea cucumbers and stuff. So maybe it was that. Maybe that's how the dingo came here. I don't know. This is from the Australian Museum website. Yeah. Quoting a guy called Jackson. Oh, my.

Maybe it was me. Maybe I wrote this. I don't know. The dingo is Australia's wild dog. It is an ancient breed of domestic dog that was introduced to Australia, probably by Asian seafarers, about 4,000 years ago. Its origins have been traced back to early breeds of domestic dogs in Southeast Asia. That's cool.

I would have been insane for the people here, just being like, that's a new kind of guy. What? Holy, what about that dog that's got two noses? You know this dog? No. I think it's from Southeast Asia. Doesn't smell. How does it smell?

Really well. It smells twice as well. No, it's more like its noses bisected down the middle. So its nostrils are on like two separate snouts. with like a weird divot in the middle. And it's, I don't think it exists anymore, but it definitely existed for a while. Yeah, the idea of that makes me feel a bit sick.

It's like a normal, he's fine. The dog's getting by. Don't worry about the dog. He's having a great time. I wish I could remember where it was, it might be Southeast Asia, it actually might be South America, maybe somewhere. Somewhere South.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, Google image just gives you pictures of dogs that that's happened to these days. Yeah, that's not what you want. I don't recommend. The dogs look happy It looks like they're living good lives

But it definitely sets off a part of the brain That thinks, oh Unwale Body horror. It's a kind of body horror. Yeah. Anyway, it was a two-nosed dog.

It was pretty cool. That's all you need to know. To understand the cane, you have to understand their namesake cane or sugar cane. Oh my God. Use for sugar production. Sugar cane was also brought to Australia from South Africa with the first fleet in 1788.

But the industry really took off in Queensland land in the 1860s. The climate up north is suitable to grow sugar cane, which is native to warm temperate, and tropical regions of India, Southeast Asia and New Guinea. Everything was going well until a couple decades later in the 1880s

when white grub attacks began to damage the crops. The white grubs are the larvae of up to 13 different species of native beetles that eat the roots of the cane, causing the plants to die. The most famous is the cane beetle. Well, that's native, yeah? Yes. The sugar was in our house.

Yeah, yeah. It was in his house. Yeah, but it's funny to be that they're named after, we were here before. I used to just be the beetle. This is weird. Adult beetles eat the leaves of sugar cane, but greater damage is done by their larvae,

hatching underground and eating the roots, which either kills or stunts the growth of the plant. White grub. White grub. White grob. Same. Their eggs and larvae are often buried deep underground, making them difficult to exterminate.

Okay. Oh, so they're clever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The government knew there was a problem and bowed to pressure from cane growers and were forced to establish the Queensland Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations or the BSES. That rules. That sounds so much more fun than it is. I want to go to a sugar experiment station.

That was 1900. Wow. The Beatles were studied and lots of methods of control were experimented with, many of which involved. pesticides that were either ineffective or unnecessarily killed other insects. So they were like, oh, the damage isn't quite worth it. So these were deemed inappropriate. One idea was to introduce another animal to take care of the cane beetles. They tried minor birds earlier and that didn't work out.

By this time they were riding high from the success, finally of the 1925 introduction of the cactus moth that dealt with invasive prickly pear plants. Okay. Well, I'm seeing lots around. I don't think it did a good job. Well, the prickly pears that had also been introduced and had quickly overgrown huge sways of land, like millions of acres apparently.

Wow. And nothing could sufficiently deal with them until the moths came along and in just a few years, ate up to 70% of the cactus. What? Did the moth cause any kick-on problems? No, I don't think so.

It's seen as one of the successes. Yeah, yeah, wow. This thing. Good on your cactus moth. It's that. That cactus that grows almost, it looks 2D, it looks like little upside down tear drop shapes that keeps growing, but they actually grow a fruit on them called prickly pear. Oh, I know how it looks like they wear a hat sometimes?

Oh, yeah. Those guys. Okay. And you see them around a lot. Yeah. Well, out in the country where there's big swathes of land to be ravaged by a prickly bear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They need more of them moths. Yeah. They're a pest, and I think there are, like, laws in place where you, if you live on a land that has prickly pear, you have a legal responsibility that you have to get rid of the prickly really? And it's really hard.

Yeah. And they're cactuses. They will thrive under neglect. Yeah. Don't give me anything. I love it. No, don't leave me alone. I hate that.

So that case is often cited as an example of successful biological pest control. And if it worked, then why couldn't it work for the cany? B-Dol. Why not? That's what they were saying. It didn't work with the minor bird earlier, but we... That was a bird. We went too big. Birds can fly elsewhere.

That was our mistake. Unlike bots. You reckon they would have been going before? I mean, maybe you'll say whether or not there's a true, but they went moths first. So they were like, well, the cactus moth worked. We got any cane moths? No. We know moths are good.

Well, Reginald Montgomery, an entomologist, that's a bug guy. Yeah. Was convinced the cane toad was the answer. to a major agricultural crisis in the sugar industry is they reportedly solve similar beetle problems in Hawaii, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Okay. So obviously they don't have the exact cane beetle

because that's native to Australia, but they've got similar bugs that are affecting their crops. And the cane toad done super well over there. Yeah. Cain toads are also known, as I said, the giant neotropical toad are native to South and mainland Central America. They're considered to be a very large species of toad. They are big.

Inver toads. reaching up to 15 centimeters in body length, occasionally getting up to 25 centimeters. Whoa. That's... In body length. That's no good. Sorry, I didn't talk about body width.

Like when you're watching tennis and they'll say racket head speed. It's like, yeah, you say speed. What else? What on the spot is speeding? They do get huge though, K and Toads. They're so, like, it's a shock whenever you see one because they're so big. Yeah, they are very big. Yeah.

And for anyone who hasn't seen one, this is how the Australian Museum describes them. Adult toads have a light brown or yellow brown back with darker patches and spots. The skin is dry and warty. The word warty. Warty is a weird one because it's not actually warts, is it? It's just lumpy, right? This sort of looks like that, yeah. The belly is white or yellow, sometimes with grey mottling.

Oh, mottling. Goodness. I don't know what a name is. Yeah, fancy. Fancy toad. Adults have large parrited glands on the shoulders which secrete toxins when the toad is under threat.

I think if you didn't, even if you didn't know the cane toad was poisonous, if you saw it, you'd know. Yeah. Looks poisonous. Absolutely. Lumps up top spots on belly.

They're a grotesque little guy. Oh, God. I think they're kind of pretty. Show us? Let me see if that's true. The modelling and stuff, it's like little nice watches. Oh, yeah, and like the, they get the like eye ridges that, no, I can see it's kind of pretty. Yeah, but I think all the photography of cane toads for at least Australia.

Oh. They photograph them from a low angle and it makes them look mean. Oh, yeah. Because they're trying to make them look at like a nasty species. I really like this photo you have here cast of a cane toad eating another cane toad. That's good. It's got its mouth open the legs of another cane to. problem, but also part of the solution.

More cantoes. Oh my God, that's genius. I bring in more from Puerto Rico. Get the 25 centimetre ones in and then... I'll eat the little ones. It's a real, you know, the lady who ate the fly? Yeah. That's what Australia is.

That was their old policy on pest control. Yeah. Well, they ate the fly. Well, they eat the fly. We'll have to eat a frog or whatever. Get the frog in. Get the frog in. We'll find something that eats a frog and then eventually

It's big enough that, yeah, we'll figure it out. Eventually, we're putting blue whales out in the cane fields. It's like lowering them from a helicopter. Open up. So Reginald Montgomery was pushing to use the toads to take on the cane beetles. This is again from PetSmart. They're right. In June 1935, Montgomery traveled to Hawaii, where he captured 102 toads and brought them back to Australia.

When he arrived at the Meringa Experimental Farm near Gordon Vale, in far north Queensland on the 22nd of June 1935, all but one toad had survived the journey. Oh, wow. So that kid from Northern Italy, he brought up 10 lizards back. He'd had a better success rate. Yeah, should have put the cane toads in socks.

Yeah, socks had been worn by a boy. A boy socks. The toads were housed in a purpose-building enclosure and left to breed. On June 19 that year, so this is about six weeks later, 2400 toads were released into sites around Gordon Vale. In less than two months, the number of toads had increased at least 24-fold. There's such a...

Reproducing in nature is not that easy. And a lot of animals overproduced because a lot of them will like... The eggs will die off in the process or like the babies will die off or sometimes the person who birth them just because you'd be hungry. And then when you do them in these controlled environments, it's too many. And then you put them in nature, which is... it doesn't have all the things that should eat all the eggs. Oh, God, it's such an issue.

Have you seen that person in the US who has rescued a million frogs? Oh, no. They went to a local pond and they were like, oh, there were all these frog eggs, but they're going to die, so I brought them home, and now they're breeding 1.4 million frogs. Yeah.

And people keep trying to report them for environmental terrorism, but it's just some kid on TikTok being like, I'm going to start a frog army, and people are like, this is rich. You don't know how many frogs that is. You are going to cause a lot of arms. It's kind of like the wolves at Yellowstone. You know the wolves at Yellowstone thing?

They were like, the wolves are a problem. We got to eradicate the wolves at Yellowstone. So they completely decimated all of the wolves' numbers. And then what happened is that the wolves weren't eating the deer. And that meant that the deer population was going crazy. And because there were so many dears, the dears were eating all of the foliage. Because all the foliage was being eaten, it meant that the weather and stuff could have a far more devastating effect because there weren't the trees to prevent erosion.

and because the weather was having it, and it just had this insane kick on effects, and they had to reintroduce wolves back in the Yellowstone to eat all the deer, because it was causing such a massive problem. Why were they worried about the wolves in the first place? I think they were like, oh, the wolves are probably going to eat us or whatever, you know.

So they were not introduced. No, no, it was just, it was basically just like part of the environment and the ecosystem, and they were like, well, the wolves are scary. How do we keep making this mistake? Humans are really done. They've been set up perfectly. It's in a perfect balance.

Yeah. Let's fuck with it a little bit. Let's see what happens. But I mess up the balance heaps. So therefore I can change things. I'm like that kid with the frogs. Like all the frog eggs were going to die. Yeah, that's nature, maybe.

Which is what was meant to happen. And they're like, I'll save them. God. I don't know what's going to happen because people keep trying to report this kid. So maybe by the time this is released that has something has concluded. It's so stressful. Crazy. Oh, yeah.

So Montgomery, he put out. 2400 toads and now there's like over 10,000 of them. Further releases of toads in the cans and Ines Valley areas followed. Not everyone was on board, though. Another Australian entomologist, Walter Froggett. Oh, listen to this. He's like, listen to me. I'm the frog man.

He's like, let's release frogs, not toads. Yeah, forget about it. I got toaded on my son. He voiced concerns that maybe this wasn't such a great idea. It seems like it. He wrote, this great toad, immune from enemies, omnivorous in its habits. That's right, omnivorous, sorry, in its habits.

And breeding all year round may become greater pest as the rabbit or the cactus. He's like, you know the thing that we're worried about? Remember how we've done this multiple times and you're citing one time? This could happen again. He convinced the government to ban the introduction, but this ban was soon overturned. The government changed and then went, no, it's good. We like the toads. Yeah.

Not doing it isn't working. Maybe doing it will change something. By March 1937, some 62,000 toadlets. Oh. That's cute. It does. That's what got the government back on board. They're only toadlets.

Oh, they're only babies. Fuck you, frog it. They were bred in captivity and then released in some areas around Cairns, Gordon Vale, Inisfail in northern Queensland. More toads were released around Ingram, Ayr, Mackay and Bundaberg, and the toads spread like wildfire. Like wildfire. Oh dear.

Oh dear. But at least they meant there'd be less beetles, right? Yeah, surely. The one question you think they consider is they actually eat cane beetles, right? Right? Came toads, cane beetles makes sense? Surely, can't. Yeah.

Well, this is debated. Again from PetSmart, which has a great article that I'll link to in the show notes, There is no evidence of any pre-release testing by the Queensland Bureau of Sugarment Experiment Station and gemologists to determine if the toads even ate the cane beetles. That's amazing. They had to breed them and feed them. Why didn't they just feed them? They had to check.

But also, you've got to think, like, I reckon a cane toad will probably eat anything, really. So, like, you give it a cane beetle and it eats it. You're like, yeah, I mean, there we do. Oh, true. But probably, they eat mice and stuff. They don't care. The beetles that the toads were supposed to control when native Australian species, different to those causing problems in Hawaii, Puerto Rico,

yet no trials were carried out to see if this translated to Australian conditions. Risk assessments of potential harms from the introduced species were not done either. Yeah, yeah, good. Others say, no, they do eat some of the larvae at the bottom of the cane toads like they're supposed to. Okay. But they're also terrible for other native animals around them. It just so happens that the cane toads are toxic at all life stages, from eggs to adults. Oh, wow.

And then their bodies as well. Same here. It's good to be consistent. They have large swelling. Swellings called paratoid glands on each shoulder behind their eardrums. This is where they carry their milky white toxin known as buffer toxin. Sounds scary. Their skin and other glands across their backs are also toxic.

Their poison couldn't even be pleasant. Yeah. It's all gross. It's all milky and disgusting. Milky sounds pleasant to me. I feel like, but I feel like a milky poison is worse. Like if someone's like, you've got two poisons in front of you. One's milky, one's clear?

Oh. Do you want the clear one? Or is clear better worse? I feel like clear is going to get the job done in the quickest amount of time. That's what I think is well. With least damage to me. Milk sounds painful for some reason. Yeah, I don't know why.

I feel like milk, whatever's going to happen, you're going to have the worst surprise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if it's, you know, glowing green or red or something, I'm like, ah, I'm getting what I get, you know. That's a classic poison. Milky secretion. Yeah, it's funny. I'd go the milky one. Really?

What's appealing about the milky poison? I think it's reminded me of... Milk? There was some sort of a medicine I'm vaguely remembering as a kid with that milky colour. I think out of the medicine you mean. Yeah. Was it kind of like cherry flavour? Yeah, maybe.

Oh, for throats. Yeah, maybe for throats. And I'm like, so I think that's all it is. Okay. Medicine's like a poison. Yeah, it's a good poison. Yeah. Positive poison.

Well, native animals to Australia hadn't had time to adapt to the milky poison. And many animals are killed each year trying to eat the toads. This included and still includes other natural predators of the cane beetle. So some stuff does eat the cane beetle. For example, goannas that eat the beetles were killed by attempting to eat the poisonous cane toads. Unless goannas means less beetles being eaten. So overall, even if the toads are eating some of the beetles, they can't eat enough to make up for the other animals they kill.

that are no longer there to eat the Beatles. That's so cool. So it's not a plus game. No. And even larger predators like freshwater crocodiles aren't safe. They've suffered in massive population declines due to consuming cane toads. The big ones, the saltwater crocs are usually okay, though.

They can eat the cane toad not. So let's release the saltwater crocs. Yeah, put a bunch of saltwater crocs in the cane fields. We might have to first release salt water. Yeah. That is, oh my God, salted carriots. caramel cane. Oh, young.

That's down with a dog. Never mind. Never mind. It's fixed. But imagine you are a crocodile. You've been alive forever. I'm there. It didn't take you long to get into that.

Little fog fucko. Yeah. Delicious. Dead. Yeah. Thousands and tens of thousands of thousands of years maybe. Crocodiles are old. Yeah.

All it took was one little chunky little cane dode. Yeah. They're not like changed since dinosaur time? Yeah. Millions of years. Yeah. So they're millions of years old. You've been able to eat whatever you like that whole time.

And this new thing comes along, you're like, oh, yeah. I'm going to try and eat this. Oh, I can eat this. You guys. And then they get killed. They're bite-sized as well for like its whole water crocodile, you know? It's insane that that crocodile can, that that poison ratio is enough. That's enough.

Like, even like, you think it'd be upset stomach or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can feed a dog a little bit of chocolate. It's like all about size ratio. Don't do it. You can feed a dog a little chocolate. be sick, but they won't die. And like, that's so toxic if it's killing a whole crock.

Am I remembering this wrong that some animals lick them to get a natural high? Is that something else? I think that's a kind of toad. I haven't read that about cane toes. Some animals do eat them. So there's a myth that nothing can eat them. So things that eat them include wolf spiders. Okay.

That's insane. That rules. Our red-bellied black snakes. Okay. Release the snakes. Yeah. They're famous. Put the snakes in the cane.

Everybody just wears tough boots or whatever when they're dealing with a cane. They're really venomous as well, aren't they? Yeah. I think they're the top two? Absolutely. All spiders are also exceptionally venomous. We have really cooked it. Native water rats can have a go.

Oh, okay. Oh, they're cute. Yeah, that's all wet. You're talking about like J. La Gaya. Crows. Oh, okay. First can eat them. Some cookabarras can eat toads and be fine while others drop dead immediately.

So they're playing roulette. Wow. So what is it just like a genetic thing in the kookabur? That means that... Yeah, yeah, some of them... That's crazy. ...arend aren't susceptible to the poison. And as for humans, from the start, this is from the World Wildlife Fund,

who cede as their duty to spread awareness. Despite popular urban legend that licking cane totes can get you high, this is purely a myth. However, humans can get incredibly ill if the toxin is ingested, and if sprayed with... It can cause intense pain, temporary blindness and inflammation. If this is what it can do to humans, that it can definitely kill dogs,

other household pets and native animals. So they're saying, don't lick a toad. Surely there was a period of time where, because that myth is so prevalent. Yeah. Like people were like, I believe until today.

Let's get high and look some cane toads. Oh, no. I thought it was other kinds of toads. I thought there were special licking toads. Right. I think there might be. Yeah. I just can't,

don't lick a cane toad. Yeah, that one's just poison. The same as mushrooms. You've got to pick the right one. Yeah, there's like thousands of species of mushroom. He's got to, to get the right one. Portobello?

These are doing nothing for me. I just feel nourished. It's a scam. So not many anythings can eat them, but they can in turn eat anything. Yeah, okay. In fact, they'll eat anything that they can swallow. They'll eat anything. Both dead and living.

This includes pet food that they come across. Animals that are dead, they'll just eat anything they find. Household scraps. But they mostly exist. Andy, that could come in here. Yeah, poor new... We just put every house... gets their green bin has a cane toad in it.

It's just a cane toad at the bottom of a bucket. But you don't let them out. No, no, no, no. It just gets big. Why not all of them? If they can eat anything, why don't you put them in also in the recycle? They ate cans, probably. Put them in the tip.

Yeah, put them in the tip and they'll just set them up in landfill. Yeah. I'd be happy they've got someone to eat. Yeah. Go to the ground. We're bringing it to them. There's a protective wall so they're not getting out. It's toxic anyway.

Yeah, we fine. Has anyone thought about this? Hang on, hang on. Use your brains, guys. Are we trying to figure. something by introducing a series. Is this how it starts? They haven't made it to Melbourne yet, but maybe we could just bring it in the tip.

It'll be fine. They mostly exist on a diet of living insects. Okay. There are bugs in the tip. I know, I'm back on board. Sadly, they just don't need enough of the cane beetle to satisfy people. That's so funny. They also reproduce at an incredibly alarming rate.

Female cane toads lay anywhere between 8 to 30,000 eggs twice a year. Oh my God. These eggs hatched within one to three days and tiny tadpoles emerge. Do you mean eight, like, single digit? Oh, 8,000. Oh, yeah. I was also a big. I'm like, what a wide range.

No, it's 8,2.30. That's still pretty huge. Yeah, even on the low end, it's still a shitload. Yeah. Well, two cane toads could produce 60,000 cane toads within a year. That's bonkers. That's banned. And then, so they become.

tadpoles after three days. The tadpoles become toads after about a month, but tadpoles in warm, shallow water can develop in just 10 days. Oh my God. So within 13 days. You got 60,000 cages. If they're in the right condition.

Oh my God. That's from one. That's from one. That's no good. That's, we got to stop them. They're already toxic as tadpoles too. So it's not like anyone can eat a, like it's not like native animals can just go

get them at tadpole stage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're always toxic. Jesus. Most horses estimate there's now 200 million cane toads across Australia. Although some put this figure as high as 1.5 billion. How many Wyoming's is that? Yeah, do the Wyoming math.

That's Wyoming number of Wyoming's. We've got exponential Wyoming here. Wyoming Square. All in all this means they have no natural predators, or no serious natural predators. You know, some eat them. They can't keep up and kill almost anything that they touch. They typically devastate a local native predators by 90% within a few months of their arrival.

Wow. And like I said at the top of the episode, Cain Toads have expanded through Australia's northern landscape, and they're now moving westward at an estimated 40 to 60 kilometres per year. In February 2009, Cain Toads crossed the Western Australian border with Northern Territory, which is over 2,000 kilometres from the site that were first released 74 years early. for it. So they're really...

You got to admire it. Do you reckon they know? Do you reckon they see too many of themselves around? They're like, this doesn't seem right. I think they're like, we are living in a utopia. This is all out. It's the year of the, it's the time of the cane to. Especially the ones on the frontier.

Yeah. Look at all this. Un-eaten food. Yeah, you're first there. Wow. It's so much to consume. It would feel cool as an introduced species. and, I mean, probably because it would be very awful to be transported,

but then being opened up into delicious food, and they're like, eat it all. They're like, go for it. Eat away. That rules. No way. Yeah. We're not stopping you.

We can't. We're trying. Well, just like the cane beetle before it, lots of ways to eradicate the pest have been proposed. In 2012, researchers experimented with training predators to avoid larger cane toes by feeding them smaller specimens, which would make them ill,

but would not kill them. Okay. Like a vaccine. Yeah. Well, they call these taste aversion strategies, including feeding sausages made of minced amphibians. The northern qualls. Oh.

The quolls. The quals back. The carnivorous marsupial. Dave, it's nothing like a vaccine. Forget what I just said before. Yeah, we don't get little minced COVID's. Little COVID sausage. Imagine if all of the government rollouts were sausage for us.

We've got democracy sausage and they're like, here's a COVID sausage. They're like, everyone line up for your flu sausage. Oh, there's still be people saying, don't eat. The sausage. Don't eat the sausage. The government sausage is controlling your mind. How do we know where it was cooked? It'd be much more believable that there were microchips in a sausage.

It's easier to get a bit of microchip in a sausage. I think you feel it crunch. They're like swallow all the gristle. Make sure. You know how some people for the vaccine are like, okay, when you get vaccinated, wrap your arm in like, what it was charcoal or something. It'll suck the microchip out or like magnetize your arm and it'll negate it. Why are you talking

this now? But it was like, you know, do this in the hours after you vaccine and all the microchips will be gone or whatever. Be like, all right, eat the sausage, but chew. Chew really hard. Chew it for 10 minutes. And then you'll eat the microchip. A little crunch in the person administering the sausage.

It's like, what was that sound? Can you eat another one real quick, actually? This is a free one. So the plan with the quals was they eat the meat, which caused vomiting in the hope that they'll put them off eating any toes again. They go, oh, I don't want that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, do they just not trust sausages anymore?

Yeah, I know, because how do they know it's a sausage? I guess it's smell. Yeah, it's maybe the taste, like, get a little bit of it. They're like, oh, wait. That's like that fowl sausage. It hasn't been widely introduced, so it's not, I don't think it's been a super success. No, they form the sausage into the shape of a toad. Oh, yeah, it's made out of toad meat in the shape of a toad.

Tote or cake. Strategies for population control have also been proposed. This is similar to the mosquito thing cast. Oh, yeah. involves the release of sterile males into the population. Okay, cool. These males would compete for resources with other males, while themselves not being able to reproduce.

A second strategy... So they're having little vasectomies? Yeah. And they're putting them back out there. But they don't know. But then, like, also training them to be real badass. Yeah, yeah. Poth, impotent guys.

That's what will save the day. A second strategy would be to insert a gene into female toads, which would allow them to only create male. off spring. Oh, okay. That works. You'll eventually, you know, breathe them down. Like in a drastic park.

Boys club, boys club. Yeah, boy. Boys club, indeed. In 2005, David... Real sausage fest. Calls are like, oh no. 2005, David Tolner,

a former federal MP, famously urged Northern Territory residents to help squash the problem with their golf clubs and cricket bats. Oh, no. That wasn't a, that wasn't a fun little... Pond.

Yeah, that was just, that was just what's happening. No, effectively turning eradication into sport. Animal rights groups were outraged at this, and he copped a lot. Yeah. I have heard that hidden cane toads with the car makes a really big bang. Like running them over makes a noise, and I think people, for a while were encouraged. Yeah, it makes a big popping noise, and people for a while were like, If you see a cane tone, you've run it over.

Right, because it's not good. Not good. I think that a problem with that is that I think the eggs survive. Yeah, I think I've heard that too. They're toxic. Yeah. No one's eating them because we train them not to. Good.

So the RSPCA and Darwin, they recommend killing captured amphibians by smearing them with either hemorrhoid cream, which I'm sure we've all got at hand at all the time, which acts as an anaesthetic. They also recommend putting the toads in the fridge to cool them down. This immobilizes them and an ethertises them before, putting them in the freezer for 24 hours where they slowly just fall asleep and die. I don't want to put a cane toad in my fridge.

That's what I was posted. So the reason I'm doing this report is I got fascinated with cane toads. My sister's moved to Brisbane and we're up there for Christmas. Yeah. And she's like, oh, don't mind the cane toads in the freezer. Because they have them in their backyard and to kill them humanely. That's what they recommend. What the fuck?

What are you mean? Aren't they poisonous? Yeah, you wrap them in plastic bags, I think is the recommendation. That's so crazy. And smear them in, yeah. In hemorrhock cream. Of course. Cover them in hemorrhoid cream.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine they got real smooth. Yeah, I was going to the box. Get rid of all the warts. Yeah, we go to the pharmacist. They're like, oh, cane toads, no. But overall, so far there isn't a national eradication strategy, which is a little worrying considering how far they're spread

and how destructive they can do. Yeah, absolutely. It feels like they should have would have got on the same page by now. Yeah, we've had decades of them continually moving. It's just getting worse and worse and worse. It's a CSIRO. Yeah, what are they doing? No, there's no, apparently.

Although they didn't they lose all their funding? Yeah, and there's no funding for this either, apparently. Really? I think there should be more funding. Is there a conspiracy that at the top levels? Big Toad? That's why all our scientific funding has been dropping because Big Toad's in the era of government.

That's what makes Vagemite so delicious is cane toad poison. They'd never kill them all. The state of Queensland in some ways have embraced their association with the pest. Oh, okay. Cain Toad is a colloquial term for an inhabit of Queensland, particularly the state's state of origin rugby league team members. and supporters. Yeah.

That's fair. Like, I get it. Like, in a way, the cane toad is lovable. I can see that. He's like everybody's grumpy old uncle. You know what I mean? In terms of sport,

they're an unstoppable thought. Yeah, exactly. So, like, what are the whites, if not a cane toad on this beautiful land? You know? I reckon that's a fair name. Yeah, 100%. Townsville holds an annual Toad Day Out.

Oh, okay. On March 29, where the community learn about and catch cane toads with prizes for the largest toad court. It's mainly for kids. And the heaviest weight of toads caught, then the toads are killed humanely with gas. Oh, so it's like,

that's insane. That's like a kids festival. That's so funny. Hey, kids, I assume they're like, wear gloves because these are poisonous. And then they're like, ha ha ha ha ha ha. We're sending the toads away now. Well, don't.

What did you think they were going to do with them? Re-release them? You said they were embracing them. It's so funny to be like, Little Susan, well done. You win the blue ribbon for the biggest cane tone. What's going to happen to it now? It's going to be gas.

Oh, now I'm going to drop a large anvil on top of it. Yeah, why aren't they putting them in a big freezer? Yeah, exactly. Why are they gas in a lot? To do mass? It's the quickest. I think CO2 is very, it is seen as very... This is like the car exhaust.

Yeah, I think it's seen as very humane, but there's not many people have access to it. Yeah, it's fair. Most people have a fridge. I'd be worried if you would. dropping heavy things on them, it'd be like a luny tune situation where you like drop a safe on a cane toad and it just opens it up and gets it. Like waddles away all flat?

Oh God, we made him wider. The, yeah, I reckon I saw a story on, on TV. Whatever. But it was about these little groups going around in Melbourne, collecting the introduced minor birds, bagging them up, putting him in the freezer to. sort of knock them out and then taping that to their exhaust and they're like this. That's such

a dense way to do it. They were like this is and they were doing like bags a day. Wow. It's surely got to be but I mean I know this is the same thinking that got us the cantoe but surely there's got to be a way to do it that doesn't involve like individual little like

collecting them and freezing them where we can just yeah there's some sort of natural method that takes care of itself. It's never you're never going to make it dent in it. Yeah, exactly. That's what it feels like. Yeah.

But then you're just doing the same thing. I think they feel like they're doing their part. Just, you know, get together with the boys, do a few bags. Oh, God. How many bags did you do that? I couldn't believe this, but it was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. The Toad Day Out in Townsville was inspired. It's, it's, I'm quoting now, by a 1993 episode of the Simpsons TV cartoon show

in which residents were called upon to beat as many snakes to death as possible. for the annual Wacking Day. I thought of Wacking Day. Me too. Inspired by Wacking Day. It's inspired by Wacking Day. It's inspired by Wacking Day. That's incredible.

That's incredible snakes. I love this sexy slither. Make Quimby with these pre-wax snakes. That's so funny because the episode is not kind to Wacking Day. No. They let them live. Yeah, yeah. But in this they're like, oh, like in the real life, they're like,

oh, like how great it is on the Simpsons. will do it. Yeah, to be honest, I've never finished an episode of The Simpsons. I just watched like the first 16 or 17 minutes. Somebody's just vaguely described the episode to me. And then the Australian episode is also... Oh, you're better. I was going to finish with, you know you've made it when The Simpsons parody you

and that has happened to Cain Toads. On the season six episode, back when it was great too, Bart versus Australia, a toad like creature seems to be taking over. There you go. A guy says, these bloody things are everywhere. They're in the lift, in the lorry, in the Bond Wizard, and all over them along a gilder, Chuck. There's a, doesn't Bart, or someone calls it a toad at one point,

it says, that's a funny name. I would have called it a Charles Wuzzle. March says, we call him Bullfrogs. But yeah, it's clearly a parody of the cane toad. That's amazing. So you know you've made us. Yeah, that's, oh, absolutely, that's fame right there. I wish I had answers for you as to what we're going to do about it,

but I don't think there is one at the moment. We're surely, okay. We'll just introduce some sort of poisoned bug that's more delicious than anything that it came to me. Or like, can we introduce something that's like that, so yes, it will become a problem, but it's going to breed slower so it'll be easier to take care of. You know, like say we went the saltwater crocodile route, okay? Yeah.

We know one saltwater crocodile can probably eat like a hundred doads. And then, well, it can't be that hard to get rid of a saltwater crocodile. Why? You can just, what about you fence off? Yeah. Fence off some area, like really fence it off. Yeah. drop a couple of saltwater crocs in there.

Yeah. Or maybe one, pretty territorial. Yeah. And once he's, once he's eaten all his frogs, take him home, move the fence to a different bit. Yeah. Oh, just fencing little areas. Yeah, maybe put the fence on wheels. Yeah.

With a remote control and it's just slowly moving across the land. You'd need to keep it fenced off so that no cane toads got in. Yeah. We're going to have to divvy up the land with little fences. Yeah, and have a gate. Let them into the gate. Can you train a crocodile? Well, then we domesticate them.

I think it's rude to think we could. I think if we manage to domesticate a crocodile, that crocodile is smarter than the person who trained it. You know what? I think actually the solution we talked about earlier in this episode with the Burmese Python. What's that eating heaps of? Frogs.

What a frogs kind of toads. You're going on with similar logic. They had bugs, right? They'd frogs. The dogs are basically the same thing. Oh, someone will check. Yeah, no, no doubt. I won't check, but someone's going to look into it.

Because it would be crazy for us not to, and then we're releasing thousands of pipes. Crazy frog. Could release the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Just drive them. They love it and start boning even more. Oh, no! The crazy frog starts breeding. Why are you tested?

Oh, no, they've developed little penises. And aviation goggles. And little vests. Why did they develop pants? Can we just show the crazy frogs penis on TV? That's really awesome, I think. We're going backwards, haven't we? I wouldn't get away with that anymore.

We used to be a real country. Showing the crazy frogs penis on prime time. Well, Jackson Bailey, Caspage, thank you so much for joining us to talk about cane toes, and other ridiculous decisions to introduce species around the world. If you were to introduce an animal, what would it be? Great question. From another place? Yeah.

I'm going to go polar bear to the outback and let's see if it loses its fur or something. We get like a hot bear. Wouldn't that be cool? And you've got to do it like they've done and bring heaps of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put him in a tent to mate for a bit and then release them. So there's like a million. Yeah, yeah.

Because otherwise, obviously the bear will just get too hot and die. But we want enough that in like 400 years, we're like, you know that hairless bear? Yeah. That was introduced by Jackson. and after an episode of DoGo on. And that's what's like 4,000 years now we call Dingo's native. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, 4,000 years, the hairless bear, our native bear.

Yeah. It's like, you know, can you say anything is native after a long time? Yeah. You go back to like, when we're like gondwana or something. Exactly. Used to be, I mean, it was all, huh? Maybe the, maybe the definition is, did they walk there? Yeah, exactly.

If they walked there, native. Okay. And Cass, have you introduced? an animal, what are you going to pick? I reckon it would be really cool. You know those like micro bats or micro sugar gliders? Oh yeah. They're only like five centimetres tall.

Bring those into the suburbs. Oh yeah. I want those instead of mice. Yeah, they are cute. They can be up high mice. They can like imagine instead of little cold webs in a unicornie, you just got a tiny little bat or a sugar glider just hanging out in the eaves. That rolls.

That would be cute. I feel like enough people have those old sharehouses that have picture railings in them. Yeah. A little sugar guy just sneaking across there. That would be good. to Eve. I would prefer that and then they can kick out the introduced mice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Our native mice are beautiful. Yeah, they are. They're very nice. Very lovely. Now, if we want to hear more of you guys, you guys do multiple podcasts, where can we hear those and what are they? God, we're sick with them. It's disgusting. Well, we both do D&Ds for nerds. Yeah, that's true. If you like Dungeons and Dragons, you can

listen to D&D is for nerds. I personally do plumbing the DAT Star, thumb cramps, baseless speculation. that might be it and it is for nerds. Yeah. I'm also on shut up a second, which Jackson's on sometimes as well.

Yeah, I'll pop into a thumb cramps. It's great. Yeah, it's all. Just go to sanspensradio.com, click on a podcast. Oh, it's all there. Will and be in one of them, guaranteed. And you want to find me personally,

I'm at All Dogs are Dead on Twitter. And I'm at Cass Cass Page. Great. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I'm going to be thinking about cane toads for the rest of the freaking week.

And we're back in the room. Sadly, I have had to depart from Matt. Well, Matt had to depart from me. He had to watch an NFL game and an Irish pub. You know, cultured activities like that really awaited him. So he had to leave. It's Dave here, by the way. And it's going to be solo tonight, a solo mission through what everyone is calling their favorite section of the show.

And I'm pretty happy about that, that I've been trusted with the favorite part of the show. Now I've got that pesky report out the way. It's on to a thing that we like to call the fact quote or question, which has a jingle that goes something like this. Fact quote or question, ding! Almost lost it, but saved it, I reckon. Always remembers the ding and absolutely nailed it. This is the part of the show where we'd like to thank the people that make it possible,

our fantastic Patreon supporters. And those people have been to either do go onpod.com or, patreon.com slash do go one pod and they've signed up to support the show which is fantastic because otherwise we can't do it every single week. We're approaching our 350th week in a row coming out very very soon. So it's amazing and it could not have been possible without these supporters. And in exchange for your support and their support, you can get a bunch of rewards including three bonus episodes a month. I just put out one just a couple of days ago now. That was a mini reports on Thomas Fitzpatrick, who stole and landed two planes on the street of New York City.

Why you ask? The answer, of course, is a drunken bet. A drunken bed. Or two. So we put out nearly 150 of those bonus episodes now, and sometimes people ask, oh, how long do they go for? Well, last month, Matt did one, which went for over two hours. So you really get bang for your buck there.

when he went through every single reference in the song We Didn't Start the Fire, all those things, Billy Joel song, everything that he referenced in that song, Matt explained all of them and it was fantastic, very, very fun. But yeah, two-hour episode that awaits you as well as 140-something other episodes and you get access to all the back catalogue as soon as you support the show on that level and then you get three bonus episodes going forward. So yeah, check it out a bunch of other rewards too, but that does seem to be a popular one.

And you also get at a certain level to be part of the fact quote or question, which is amazingly what this segment is called, a bit of nominative determinism at its finest. With this section, people that support show at this level, Sydney Shineberg Deluxe Package, we call that level. They get to write in, give themselves the title and also submit a fact quote or question. Now Matt usually reads these out, and when he reads them out, it's usually the first time he's reading them out. It's the same for me. I haven't looked ahead, so I don't know what I'm going to be bringing out. Well, if I've got fact quotes or questions. But thank you.

First of all, too, Jessica English. Thank you, Jessica. The title that Jessica's given themselves is Pirate Attorney, no longer in charge of International Waters podcast. And there's a little note here. No, you can consider this my resignation. The Pirates have asked me to represent them. Well, congratulations on the upgrade.

I'd rather work for a pirate than a podcaster. Absolutely. They have all The Booty. but you've been doing fantastic work Jessica sadly we haven't been able to get the podcast into international waters yet but it is still my absolute dream if I could do a gig anywhere it would be there possibly Caesar's Palace

no we're definitely on international waters thanks to English who's written in a question okay fantastic okay the question is I'm going through a movie right now I'm going through a movie my god okay I really should have proof at these. I'm going through a move right now. Okay, no, I'm not going through a movie. So I've been polling everyone. I know, what is your best tip or life hack for moving or surviving the stress

of a move? Fantastic. Okay, my thing is give yourself time. The last move I did, we did not give ourselves any time at all. And in the end, we were literally just throwing shit into boxes. Stuff was getting broken. Stuff still disappeared. We don't know where it is. Or, you know, we'd have like our Christmas nutcracker next to our fine china, next to a lamp, next to the dog food, like it would just be absolute random shit in a box. And we thought, you know, well, let's unpack it on the other end. Who really cares? But it was so stressful on the other end that nearly 18 months later,

there is still some stuff in boxes. And they're all dismissed. You know, you label a box. All of them were misk. We just have misk. So that would be my number one tip is, yeah, the stress. other one is don't be afraid to if you can afford to get a mover i think especially for the big stuff so we just got a mover in for a couple of hours just do the fridge and the washing machine

and stuff like that and it really it really saves your back you know and you may not know this but i'm not the strongest of people so watching other people do it now i've also got to do the awkward thing when i'm like get home mate yeah yeah yeah just put the fridge down there yeah no worries. Oh, in the fridge, hutch? Yes, that makes more sense. That's better than in the toilet. All right, you know what you're doing? I'll leave it to the professionals. Uru. See you later. So that's my number one tip for you, Jessica, English. If anyone else is any others, we do have a fantastic Facebook group for our Patreon supporters, so I'm sure that someone might be able to post in the group and tag Jessica to say what they think.

Next up, we've got Nathan Damon. Thank you so much for your support. Nathan, just given us a fact. Also, the nickname is Ferocious. Oh, no, Ferris Relocation Expert. Ferris Relocation Expert. Ferris is a metal-containing carbon. Okay. Great work. I know that Nathan drives road trains, large trucks over in WA.

So is that what you're moving? Ferris. Maybe. And the fact is, Let's have a look. He said, Now, I thought recipe was one of the headings. Oh, we've also.

It only says fact, quote, a question, but absolutely recipes are welcome. And he says, well, it is now. This is for my famous Bolognese toasted sandwiches. Man, I'm sorry about for this. All right, everyone, pens at the ready. Firstly, take two slices of white bread. I recommend buying a loaf of sliced bread from an Australian supermarket.

It's the best thing since. Dot, dot, dot. You fill that in. Next, you will need leftover cold bolognaise. I recommend my home-cooked recipe made the day before. My kids love it. If enough people ask this recipe, I'll be publishing on the Patreon Facebook group within a week of Matt or, in this case, Dave reading this out. For non-Patrions, sign up.

That is, that's a bit of sizzle over how good your Bolognaise is. Please post. Even if no one else asks, I want to know. I love Spag Bowl. Or some people call it Bog, but that's controversial. Anyway, thickly spread the Bolognaise over one slice of bread. bread, I find the back of a spoon works best. I'm loving this because I hate, I'm a very bad cook and when I get out of a recipe and

they sort of assume that you know what you're doing. I absolutely hate that. I've been getting recipes lately where it says step one, read the recipe. And that's what I know. It's written for a person of my cooking ability. Step one, read the recipe, idiot. Okay, next up from Nathan. Grate some mozzarella cheese over the sauce.

Pre-graded works just fine. Love that. Then complete the sandwich by placing the stick. slice of bread on top of the assembly of yumminess. This honestly is written for me. Now get your George Foreman Grill. Fuck. All right, I've got to order that. I'm on eBay now. Plug it in and place sandwich in it, pressing gently. Oh, this, all right, I've actually purchased one too soon. See how they've hit by now on eBay, but he, Nathan writes, if you don't own a George, get one. Okay. Well, I have. Good. But I suppose another type of sandwich press might work,

but no promises. Great. No one's going to be holding you to account there. Cook until the outside is brown and cheese melted. This should allow sufficient time for the bolognese to heat up to the perfect temp. Now, grab a beer, put the Saints game on, the Eagles aren't doing so well. Go Saints and enjoy. I don't trust a recipe that doesn't say enjoy at the end.

I really don't. Nathan has got another tip here. For more cooking tips, simply Google cooking tips. That's what I do. That's a good tip. the show guys and go saints. I'm on the bandwagon. Thanks Nathan Damon. If anyone makes this recipe, I would love to see these sandwiches and please Nathan post in the Facebook group. I really want to see your recipe for spaghetti bolognese. Next up and usually it's Matt's job

to pronounce this name a couple of different ways. Alex Bacchi or Bacchi. The problem is I've heard Matt say it both ways so many times. I don't know what's right Alex. I'm so sorry but the fact is you've given yourself the title of Minister of Pittsburgh Facts. Oh yes. All right. And it is a fact. This makes sense. Alex writes,

most Americans think the Lewis and Clark expedition actually started in St. Louis. But actually, it began in Pittsburgh. There you go. They started on the Ohio River, which begins in Pittsburgh. P.S., this would be a great topic for a report. I think I'll put it in the hat. But if not, here it is again. Imagine Birken Wheels, except they do.

didn't split the party. Thanks, yins. Yins, we of course learned recently that that is a local slang over there. Yins. Alex, you're me yin. Can I say that? I don't know. I don't know how to put it into context.

But thank you so much. And finally, it's Roy Phillips. Roy Phillips, you're an absolute legend. And their title is Chips Chopper, Chip Shipper, and Chip Checker for a Chip shop. Yes. Got it. Thank you so much, Roy. We're trying to...

Try to pull one over there, but you didn't. It's a question, and that is, what's your least favorite part about flying? Okay, I'm assuming you mean the process of flying in an airplane, not getting up there. I mean, the lack of oxygen, if you really are up high. My least favorite part, I've got to say, if it is about the process of flying,

going through an airport and all that sort of stuff, it has to be... Yep, it's got to be when you're at security, and you get to the bit where you have to have your stuff scanned. You put in those little trays, they x-ray, whatever. I hate how there's no consistency about whether you have to take your laptop or tablet out of your bag. And I feel like I always want to do the right thing.

So I say to them, laptop out, laptop out. And every time I ask that, they say, they look at you like, no, of course not. We don't do that here. But anytime you don't say that, they go, is there a laptop in here? You've got to take that out. Of course you've got to take that out. So I feel like I can never get that right. It's the same with my boots.

I like to wear. Boots on, boots off, and they look at you like, mate, why would I get you to take your boots off, you idiot? That's gross. Or if you don't, they go, mate, not in those boots, take them off. So you can't win, and I overthink that moment. I stress too much, especially if you've been awake for 24 hours, as is the case when you fly anywhere internationally from Australia.

I think that's it. At least I have a part about flying. I'm going to go on a bit of a trip soon, flying back to Europe, and yeah, now I'm not looking forward to that bit. but the rest of it's pretty good. I love, I don't mind flying, especially long haul, because I like the fact that unlike anywhere else, you're uncontactable. It's like you have to sit back and that's it, it's time to watch movies if you're on a plane with movies, obviously. And yeah, like there's nothing you can do. And when they offer you Wi-Fi, I'm always like, no,

why would I want to be contactable? This is my one little time where I don't exist on planet Earth, and I love that. So looking forward to it, that's my favorite part about flying. Anyway, great. Also, Also, the food is a lot better than people think. But also, I have very basic taste, and I love mushy, mushy food. All right, thanks to Roy, Alex, Nathan, and Jessica. And now it's time to thank a few more Patreon supporters. These are the people that have been supporting this show. And one of the rewards is a shout-out.

And some of these people have been waiting over a year to get their shout-out. So let's get to them now. And usually we play a little game where we come up with something related to the topic to assign each of these absolute legends. And I tell you what, when I was researching this topic, cane toads came up on the list of the 100 of the world's worst invasive alien species made by the global invasive species database. I just thought it was the greatest thing ever, that 100 of the world's worst invasive alien species. So how about I give each of you one of these species to do with what you will? Either introduce it into your own backyard or perhaps it is your job to eradicate this.

it's up to you, whether you want to be part of the problem or the hero in your own story. First up, I would like to think from Newport, and what I believe is Wales, it's James Raymond. James Raymond, let me look at my little list here. How about I give you the Clarius Batricus, which is a fish, aka the walking fish. Walking fish. It is native to Southeast Asia, and it's invasive in North America. And it is named for its ability to walk and wish. wiggle across dry land to find food or suitable environments.

So it doesn't truly walk, it wiggles. The wigglefish. How about that? You happy with that, James Raymond? Do what you will with that. If you want to introduce that to Wales, that's absolutely up to you. I would advise against it, but it's your prerogative. Thanks so much for your support.

I'd like to thank also now from Perth, but in the ACT, it says here. It's Aidan Sweeney. All right, Aiden, Aiden, let me go down this list. How about, I'm going to give you. Another one from Asia, it's the Lomantria Dispar, an insect, which is invasive worldwide. Okay, great Mr. Worldwide. It is the pit bull of insects and is the Asian spongy moth, also called the Asian gypsy moth. There you go.

It looks big. Though, having said that, I am just looking at like a blown up photo of it. There's nothing for scale here, so I don't know. It's introduced to nearly all the continents, possibly not Antarctica. there you go. Aiden, you're already worldwide. Good stuff. Hey, next up I would like to thank

from Moxie in W.A. And the name here is this week in iPhone podcast. This week in iPhone. Great. A podcast you can subscribe to on your iPhone, I assume. Thank you so much for your support.

All the way from Moxie. I said W.A. I meant Washington, not Western Australia. Washington in the U.S. Moxie, Washington. It's this week in iPhone podcast. let me give you a mammal. This is the oratellagus carniculus, which is a mammal, also known as the European rabbit.

Oh, that's the one I was talking about on this episode, invasive in Australia and New Zealand. There you go. That's your problem now this week in iPhone podcast. Thanks so much. How about now from staying in America, Texas, Roger H. Flores, and you're in Austin. Stay Weird, which a reliable source Matt Stewart tells me is possibly kind of the saying over there. Roger H. Flores, stay weird, we'll keep it weird. And it is, with a herb you'll be doing that.

The Svagnetakola Trilobata, also known as creeping oxy or the Singapore Daisy, invasive worldwide. Singapore Daisy sounds lovely. The creeping oxy sounds creepy. Honestly, I'm looking at it looks like a daisy. It's beautiful. I don't really see it as an oxy, but there you go. People love or hate this. Hate this one with that name.

Hey, thanks, Roger. And I'd like to thank from London now, where I will be very soon with the Booksheet podcast, and I really hope you'll be there on August the 10th. I'm doing a one-off book sheet show, which I assume I've announced by now on this at the start of an episode. But yes, August the 10th, a one-off book sheet. me and a couple of special guests at 229 the venue.

There's a ticket link in the description of this episode. And maybe you will get to see me. And also, Tina. Tina from London. Thank you so much, Tina, for your support. And I'm going to dedicate to you. What have I got here? It's a tree.

The Lucania, Lucofala, also known as the white lead tree or the false coa. I also like the name Jumby Bean. Invasive throughout the hotter regions of the world, native to Central America. Hot. It sounds hot. I'm looking at it. That's a hot plant. That is absolutely, that's popping. It's popping off the page. Because that was also called the River Tamarind. Love these names. Hey Tina, thanks so much. I'd like to think now from Yuma in Arizona. Giovanna Reed. Giovanna Reed from Yuma.

And I'm going to give to you a mammal. It's called, well, honestly, I'm just scrolling up and down the list. and I've found Rattus Rattus, also known as the Black Rat, Blue Rat, Bushrat, European House Rat, Ruff Rat, Rite, Ship Rat. I've been everywhere, man, and it's invasive worldwide, the Rattis Rattis. Honestly, one of the most populous animals out there, you'd imagine. Now you're in charge of them, Giovanna. Good luck, I'm sure you've got some in Yuma. I'd also like to thank from California A.A. in San Jose, Christina Howell. Christina Howell.

Let me have a look. I'm going up to the top of the list. Oh, how about the carcinous manis, a crustacean, known also as the European green crab or the shore crab, which is invasive in North America, Australia, parts of the South America and South Africa, originally from Europe and Northern Africa. There you go. I'm looking at it. That's a pretty classic looking crab.

People do not like how invasive it is, but, um, I think it's a good looking crab. Can I argue with that? Thank you so so much, Christina. I'd also like the thank from Bristol in the greatest of Britons. Love Bristol, beautiful city. Anna Wang. Anna Wang.

Okay, I'm going up and down the list. Let me get to... Oh, I haven't had one of these yet. A fungus. The Phi Top Thora Cinemone. also known as the cinnamon fungus or green fruit rot. I know which one I'd prefer to be called. Also called the stem canker.

All good bad names here. Cinnamon fungus, green fruit rot and the steam cankers. And yes, it produces an infection which causes the conditioning plants called root rot. Oh, okay. It's not very nice. But hey, if you're in charge of it, Anna Wang, maybe you'll be taking care of it. People will absolutely love you if you do that. Thank you so much.

And finally, I would like to thank from Reading in Great Britain. It is Ashley Hunker. Ashley Hunker. Okay. How about this? I'm going to give you a mollusk. Love the word mollusk. Specifically the Poma Sea Canoluculata.

A mollus, also known as the apple snail, channeled apple snail, golden apple snail. That sounds delicious. Are they edible? Let me look them up. South American in origin is also ranked as the 40th worst alien species in Europe and the worst alien species of gastropod in Europe. Oh man, people do not like these. But can you eat them? Human use.

I'm on the wiki page now. The species is edible. Fantastic. Apparently in China and Southeast Asia. You eat them raw or undercooked. Oh, fantastic. Well, sounds delicious. Ashley Hunker, you can enjoy, enjoy those.

They're also invasive in Hawaii. There you go. Hey, thank you so much to all the fantastic people supporting the show are now in charge of an invasive species. Sorry to put that on top of you, but, you know, someone's got to deal with and or exploit these things. James, Aden, this weekend iPhone, Roger, Tina, Giovanna, Christina, Anna, and Hashley. And Ashley should say there.

Not Hashley. hashtag Ashley. Maybe that's what I was going for. And finally, it's time to check in on the Trip Ditch Club. Now, this is a little secret club we've developed for people that have been on the show for three, or supporting the show. Actually, I've been on the show for three consecutive years, and I've got the master key. Though this club never closes, so we don't even bother locking the front door.

But people that have been supporting the show at the shout-out level or above for three consecutive years, congratulations. We appreciate your support, and by doing that, we induct you into a really, a Hall of Fame. A bar where good things happen. And if you're on, you get on the guest list, you're in forever. You're absolutely on the Hall of Fame. Name goes up on the wall. And at this club, Jess usually organizes food and drinks.

I've actually got a cocktail this week that I've been working on. It's called the cane toad. What it is, you lick a cane toad, and then you take a shot of the cane toad anti-venom, and then also a shot of bourbon after that to take away the taste. and repeat throughout the night as you see fit. So that's called the cane toad. People said there's no use for cantoes,

but I found one. Absolutely have found one. And as for a live band, you're never going to believe it, guys. I've actually booked this. We've been in contact back and forth for over a year. I first found these guys on Triple J Unerth, a great metal slash punk slash rock band

from Capricornia in Queensland. And they finally agreed to play the show tonight. At the Tripitch Club. and that is, you're not going to believe it, they're called Kane Toad. Cain Toad. I heard them, I listened to their song, Dressed for Pleasure on Triple J Unerth,

and I just had to hear more live, so fantastic. It would be great to have Taz, Jimmy, Aaron, and Mitch from Cane Toad, rocking out de Club tonight. And finally, it's only one thing left to do, and that's to check if there's anyone on the guest list. And you in inductees, obviously Matt usually stands by with the Velvet Rope

but I'll have to do that this week on myself as I hype people up everyone else is in the club I'm on stage reading out the new guests as people from the cult I mean club welcome welcome the other inductees in usually come up with a bit of a pump up on their name trying to make them feel welcome in the club

so here we go and Jess usually pumps me up so behind every hype man is a high woman. Sadly, she's not here at the moment, so I will have to hype myself up as well. So here we go. I'm about to lose my mind on the record. Here we go. I'd like to welcome in, first of all, Alan Gilsonan, from an unknown location, Ellen Gilsonan, more like Thrillsonan when you're around, Ellen. Yes, he's done it again. Fantastic. I'd also like to thank from Candler in North Carolina, which I know a fun fact about, but I don't have enough time.

So sorry, but it's Theresa or Teresa LaValley. or Theresa LaValle. How about a real releaser of endorphins seeing you here tonight? How about that? Or you really, you really, Terese, all of my bad feelings. That's one for different pronunciations of your name. Obviously, if I get it wrong, you get to run out, join the end of the line and come back in and I'll welcome you all the same.

So, Therase or Teresa, I've got something for everyone. And I'd like to thank also from Footscray here in Victoria. It's Kyra Jacobson, Kair, on Fira, with Karese. Kyra. Woo! Yeah. Fantastic. I would like to thank from,

they've given the pronunciation which I appreciate, from Cumry, Cumry in, I believe he's in Wales. It's Dafford Stone. Dafford Stone. I feel so good.

I thought it was stoned. But it was just seeing Daffet here. You're like a drug. Woo! You're a legend. I'm really running out of steam here. There's only one more to go. And finally,

I'd like to thank from Pakenum in Victoria. And their name listed here is Astro underscore Jess. This night is really blasting off with AstroJess. Woo! Hey, thank you so much to Alan. Theresa. There's Teresa. I've really lost that name there. Kaira, Dafford, and Astro Jess. What an absolute pleasure to welcome you in and have your names. Put above the bar, come in, have a cane toad. As cane toad rock out. Wow, we made it. Hey, that brings us to the end of the episode, everyone. Thanks so much for sticking with me. It can't be a little bit weird when this is to one guy.

talking, even though there are podcasts out there that are just that. But usually there's three of us, and then there was only Matt Nye plus our fantastic guests, and then it was whittled down to me, but you stuck with it, and I appreciate it. We'll all be back together next week. But before that, you can get in contact with us at do go onpod.com where there's links to suggest a topic. Anyone can do that. There's links to our Patreon.

We can get those rewards and support the show. There's links to our social media, which are at do go onpod. And you can email us, do go onpod at gemal.com. But apart from that, that's it for me. I'll say thank you so much for listening. We'll be back as to say next week with another episode with the crew back together. But until then, I'll say thank you so much and goodbye. Don't forget to sign up to our tour mailing list so we know where in the world you are

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