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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Hawaii cane toads a pain down under
IF YOU THINK the tiny coqui frog is annoying, imagine if it were 10 times bigger, made a noise like a motorcycle engine and was more toxic than Saddam Hussein's after-shave.
Actually, you don't have to try to imagine it, you can stick your head out a window after a rain -- and there's been plenty of that lately -- and see what a coqui frog on steroids would look like. It would look like a cane toad, a heavily armed amphibious creature known as the "Hummer of frogs," of which Hawaii has its share.
It's ironic that many in Hawaii whine about the nuisance of coquis (sometimes called the "Ethel Merman of frogs" not only because its loud screeching can cause beer steins to explode, but because, after a few cocktails, most coquis can belt out a pretty good rendition of "I Got Rhythm"). It's ironic because while we here fight the lowly coqui, in Northern Australia they are fighting the King Kong cane toad, which they were silly enough to import from Hawaii in 1935.
Hawaii imported a lot of bothersome animals to control other bothersome animals (see: mongoose versus rats), but we can't be accused of deliberately importing the coqui. The coqui apparently snuck into Hawaii from Puerto Rico or Florida in the 1990s after buying airplane tickets and posing as small French citizens in aloha attire.
But the Australians deliberately brought in cane toads from Hawaii with the idea of controlling cane beetles. They brought in only 100, but now there are more cane toads in Australia than beer drinkers, so that's saying something.
Sugar cane beetles were a mere pupu on the cane toad's menu of comestibles, and once they had polished them off, they commenced to eating everything else in sight. According to a wire story, cane toads will eat anything they can swallow, including insects, table scraps, pet food and small pets. (Not surprisingly, Australia does not have a Chihuahua infestation problem.) Cane toads have been steadily taking over the continent of Australia the way, well, Australians took over the continent of Australia.
Australians, being Australians, have tried a number of unique ways to deal with the cane toads, including, according to news reports, using golf clubs to launch them over fences and rubbing them with hemorrhoid cream. I understand the use of golf clubs for controlling frogs but don't quite get the Preparation H thing.
Apparently, rubbing Preparation H on the cane toads puts them to sleep, and then they die.
But a news account reported that few Australians "seem keen to give toads a good rubdown with hemorrhoid cream" but are willing to "make a limited compromise by diligently applying the cream to the ends of their golf clubs."
The Australians also have found some success by putting a "beer bounty" on the toads. Anyone turning in a live cane toad to a certain hotel in the Northern Territories is given a voucher for a bottle of beer. Since Australians consider beer one of the four basic food groups, the idea not only gets rid of toads, but provides needed nutritional sustenance to residents.
I don't see why we cannot attempt to use some of these methods of frog control for our own coqui problem. I doubt sending residents of Maui -- where coquis are the most bothersome -- into the wild with tubes of Preparation H will work. But there are a lot of golfers on Maui, and I suspect you'd break a lot fewer clubs on the mini-coquis than the mega-cane toads.
A beer bounty also might work, although I wouldn't be surprised if a few beer-loving Maui entrepreneurs actually started coqui ranches to take advantage of the situation.
Since we have cane toads here, and they eat everything, you have to wonder why we haven't unleashed the cane toads on the coquis. I hear frog legs are delicious, even to other frogs.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com