Australia: How 'bin chickens' learnt to wash poisonous cane toads | Hacker News Reader

Australia: How 'bin chickens' learnt to wash poisonous cane toads

bbc.com

26 pointsrguiscard14 comments

> It has earned the moniker "bin chicken" for its propensity to scavenge food from anywhere it can

To say it more accurately: We paved over their food source and these industrious creatures have adapted in spite of us.

A reminder of the general rule that "invasive species" with "no natural enemies" will only be such up to the point until some other species learns how to predate on them. We observe the same in Sweden where the seemingly unstoppable spread of the Spanish slug (Arion vulgaris) is coming to a halt as the common blackbird is acquiring a taste for it.

This is the reason I view the current all-out war against "invasive species" in the EU with some skepticism. All species have likely been invasive at some point, but nature has always found a way to keep them in check. It is how ecosystems change over time.

Except in the case humans of course. We have no, and will not have, any natural enemies. We instead need to use our sense and powers of foresight to prevent ourselvees from destroying the habitat for both ourselves and other species. It's not going all that well AFAICT.

An interesting strategy used in Australia, is to drop cane toad baits ahead of the encroaching population so that native species don’t eat them, and reducing population loss – which is the main problem.

> Cane-toad sausages laced with a nausea-inducing chemical have been dropped from helicopters ahead of the toads' front line.

> The aim is for animals to become sick from eating the baits, teaching them to avoid the toads just as the pest moves into their habitats.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-14/cane-toad-sausage-dro...

There is obviously a long tradition of trying to stop the negative effects of invasive species, especially as it affects livestock and crops. Sometimes with chemicals, sometimes by introducing "natural enemies" in the environment, and now also as in your example by sometimes teaching livestock to avoid the new menace. Many times causing other, sometime serious, problems instead.

I'm not saying let nature have its course at all times, only that over time nature will likely solve the problem of an invasive species in its own way, and we should learn to expect it and work with it.

I think with cane toads, the lethality and sheer number has very different implications. There are many species in Australia that are on the brink of extinction, whereas in other continents that have been affected longer by human intervention the species loss has already happened.

>nature has always found a way to keep them in check

Often that looks something like 'they hunted their prey to extinction and then their numbers levelled out'

> We have no, and will not have, any natural enemies.

As the Romans said " homo homini lupus" - Man is wolf to man.

With a bit of greed and a nuclear war the chances of survival for other species will greatly increase.

The more this behaviour spreads the better. I already find lots of dead toads with the tongue pulled out (presumably) by crows. Nature is correcting the mistakes of humans.

By the way I am seeing less and less toads around Brisbane, including parks and waterways. Maybe this kind of behaviour is actually under-reported.

This is quite interesting. It seems complex systems such as this have are able to repair themselves as long as the damage or stress isn't too great.

The current version of the complex system is the result of the repair of several previous almost total eradications of all components. It takes a while, but although humans are (rightly) very concerned about our effects on the world, the reality is that we would have to _actually try_, and fairly hard, to do permanent damage that wouldn't eventually be repaired or replaced with something appropriate to the new situation. Even if we melt all the ice and flood everywhere that's practical, and reduce everything within the tropics to storm-blasted wasteland, from an outside view the system will be basically OK and will just get on with it.

Yeah, I was thinking more of some kind of mathematical property or emergent quality of such a system, but earth will be fine. Humans won't be, but that's kind of deserved.

Reminds me of

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7654561

Love the Australian way of using the language, there's humour in everything - "bin chickens" indeed.

Bin birds we call them here, i don't know where the chicken bit comes from

Reply on news.ycombinator.com