Cane Toads review

For the library's science movie night ("Is it REAL science or REEL science?" Cute.) this month they showed Cane Toads. It wasn't really science fiction or horror. It wasn't even really your usual movie; it was a documentary. The way it was shot, though, with the menacing background music, strange camera angles, and way-hyped-up voice-overs and interviews, it came across as a spoof of a horror flick. The blurb described it something like "a documentary the way Monty Python might do it." Yes, very much so.

The meat of the documentary was alternately interesting and hilarious. The cane toads were apparently introduced to Australia in order to control cane grubs that were decimating the crops. Unfortunately, cane toads and cane grubs run in different circles, so to speak; there was no real way the toads would be able to prey on the grubs. The toads are very adept at survival, though, emitting poison when they're bitten and reproducing at an amazing rate. They've taken over in much of Northeastern Australia, and many of the people there treat them like pets.

Highlights of the movie include:

• The (I think American) researcher who had the most hilariously dramatic stories about how the cane toads had ruined his life
• The footage of a cane toad scarfing a mouse
• A guy in a Volkswagon mini-bus swerving back and forth across a road to hit toads
• Shots of a pond filled black with toad tadpoles

They are ugly beasts, but they're really amazing, too. It sounds like no one has any real ideas on how to control their population without doing something as bone-headed as what got them to Australia in the first place.

After the movie, a guy from the Hogle zoo put together a lecture on the non-native species introduced to Utah. Most of them were pets that people got sick of caring for, with a bunch of them being frogs. I guess frogs and toads are good at surviving. I asked him whether any of those species were on the receiving end of some sort of abatement program like what we practice against mosquitoes. He said that it didn't think that was merited for those species, and that they were more nuisances than significant problems.

The movie is worth seeing, but if you have a chance to go to science movie night, you should take it. They're scheduled the first Tuesday night of each month, I believe.