Meat Ants
zooillogix | March 31, 2009In the 1930s, Australian ecologists shortsightedly introduced the Cane Toad, a species indigenous to South America, to their isolated continent to eat agricultural pests. This famously proved to be a complete disaster with the toxic toads running rampant and native species poisoning themselves when they tried to make snacks of the delicious, dimwitted amphibians.
Now a team of Australian researchers from the University of Sydney think they may have found an elegant solution that absolutely, positively, cannot backfire into a 1970 C minus horror movie: Meat Ants. The gentle meat ant lives…
cwilcox | March 29, 2009One of the most controversial ideas in conservation is that of Biocontrol. The goal is to control invasive species or damaging pests by introducing predators/diseases/etc which kill them. Some attempts at biocontrol have been hugely successful. But others have been disastrous, like the introduction of Cane Toads.
Cane Toads (Bufo marinus) were introduced to a lot of places from 1840-1940 to attempt to control agricultural pests.
Cane Toad extent both native (blue) and introduced (red)
They were first unsuccessfully introduced into Jamaica to control the rat population. Then, a seemingly…