Environmental disasters causes by the careless introduction of foreign species makes me angry. In Australia we have feral foxes, pigs, cats, camels and possibly the most toxic of all - the cane toad. The idea was that introducing cane toads would help the sugar cane crops in the north because the toads would eat bugs that were troubling the crops. They didn't eat the bugs and ever since they have been breeding at a prodigious rate and slowly but inexorably spreading across the entire country.
They kill a huge amount of native animals and many efforts have been made to stop them. The latest idea is to genetically engineer some toad embryos so you end up with an all male toad population - no more breeding. This sounds like a fine idea - genetically engineered mutant poisonous toads; what could possibly go wrong?
My issue with this is that I've seen the movie "Cane Toads - an Unnatural History" and one interesting fact a naturalist pointed out in that movie was that cane toads are incredibly horny. He witness one of them humping a dead one that had been squashed by a car. So if this population is made all male, there's only one possible outcome: hordes of gay cane toads! This ought to push the government into action - they seem to think expending their energy stopping gay marriage is a good idea so I'm sure they won't put up with gay cane toads humping in the streets.
2 comments:
And if not that, there's a movie to be made out of it somewhere.
It certainly does seem like a movie in the making, doesn't it.
They genetically engineered cane toads to protect the environment...
They thought they were doing the right thing...
They were WRONG!
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