TOAD-ALLY UN-HOPPY

      [Story as reported by Ed Mazza, aolnews.com]

Holger Hollemann, AFP / Getty Images

Of course she's unhappy. Who likes getting weighed right after the holidays? This is Agathe, a cane toad, and she's sitting on a toy scale during an annual animal inventory at the Hanover Zoo in Germany on Jan. 5. Agathe weighs a slight hop over 4 pounds.

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."

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.