She may not look like a happy hopper ... but who feels good about their weight right after the holidays?
Agathe is a cane toad at the Hannover Zoo in Germany, and she wasn't singled out for her unflattering measurements -- the check was part of an annual animal inventory.
Agathe appears to be in perfect shape for a cane toad, coming in at just over 4 pounds.
That's leaps and bounds behind the world's most titanic toad, the scorpion-eating Goliath frog of Africa. Those beasts can grow to a foot long, weigh more than 7 pounds and live up to 15 years -- assuming they're not turned into the ultimate set of frogs' legs first.
Don't expect to see the Goliath in zoos, however -- not only are they endangered, but they also do poorly in captivity and rarely breed there, according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Cane toads like Agathe, on the other hand, are an invasive species in many areas, and their introduction into Australia in the 1930s as a form of natural pest control was a spectacular failure.
They didn't eat the beetle grubs they were brought in to control, and they quickly became a pest themselves, as documented in the 1988 film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mvV8OT-mmE&feature=player_embedded[/media]
Now, every March 29 is designated Toad Day Out in some parts of the country, and Australians are encouraged to hunt and kill the frogs to celebrate.
Last year's event took about 10,000 frogs off the map -- literally of a ton of them, according to local media reports.
Cane toads are also licked in Australia -- yes, licked -- as a recreational drug, because of the supposed hallucinatory and stimulatory effects of the frog's venom.
But at least one expert says that's all hype and no hop.
The effects recorded are more like symptoms of mild poisoning than full-blown hallucination, Paul Dillon of Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Center told the Sydney Morning Herald.
On the other hand, toad lickers risk salmonella poisoning, so let that be a lesson to you: No matter what you read on the Internet, never lick a frog.
Link: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/11/titanic-toad-is-an-unhappy-hopper/
