I'm Turning into a Cane Toad

Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov's ‘secret party name’ was Nicolai Lenin. By 'party name' we are not talking about what he told the girls at parties to impress them; rather he and his comrades hoped that if the tsar’s secret police got hold of one name they would never be able to connect the dots to the other. I expect the idea is that yes, everything is connected to everything else, but maybe the connections (like the tsar's secret police) are just a bit vague sometimes. By the way, I share a birthday with Tsar Nicholas II... how's that for coincidence?

Anyway, Vlad (or more scretly, 'Nicky') is credited with discovering the first rule of ecology: “everything is connected to everything else”, although one may doubt that that was exactly what he had in mind.

This brings us to consideration of the ecology of Australia, one of the most outlandish collections of ecological doodads and miscellany on this, or any other world.

I would go so far as to suggest that, if one were inventing a fantasy ecology, one could not come close to that of Australia without losing one’s readers entirely. The fact is that Aussie birds and beasts are just a bit too improbable to allow for a proper suspension of disbelief.

There is a creature they call a platypus that, while charming and remarkable was clearly manufactured out of the bits that were left over when all the other critters were built.

There is a fluffy and endearing creature that is frankly too lazy to look at a menu. It has a type of leaf it will eat, so it lives in that kind of tree and smells funny. If you come along and pluck it off the tree, it will cuddle you until you put it back. If it were any lazier, you would have to be chewing its food. It is hard to imagine something like this getting along in South America or Africa.

There is the Giant Australian Hopping Mouse… sometimes called a boomer, or a roo. It has many similar cousins: wallabies and whatnot. Like a bumblebee that can’t fly, a roo can’t hop. So there is this wonderful conservation of motion thing going on… something to do with springs and magnets most like. Mind you, roos do look like they might get by in Africa, Asia or even Europe. They are efficient eating machines and provide endless entertainment for Aussie farmers who like to build 80’ fences or, more likely try to introduce natives, tourists and carrion-eaters, to the idea of roo-steak, roo-pot roasts and other delectable treats.

What the Aussies really delight in telling you is about their snakes and spiders… ‘We got twenty of the seventeen most deadly snakes in the world mate, but don’t worry only three or four of ‘em are whatcha call urban snakes, mate, yer likely to find in yer bed, goodonyer. Oh, and we got every poisonous spider in the world, mate, right down here on Circular Quay, Oh, yeah… don’t turn around, move this way very slowly and goodonyer…”

They’re a brave and virile lot them Aussies. Then, they have those other critters, the ones that don’t actually appear to, not to put too fine a point on it, exist in the actual physical world. (Since this is a discussion of actual Aussie ecology I’m not going to comment on whether ‘drop bears’ exist outside the minds of them brave and virile Aussies. Well, it is not really a discussion about Aussie ecology for that matter, it is a blog and I am going all out to meander. After all, I’m writing this in a hospital bed on a laptop that barely works. I can meander about all I want… it’s my blog ☺ )

To go along with their truly bizarre (and often brightly-hued) flora and fauna, Aussie ecology has included several of the most dramatically outlandish ecological blunders in the history of the sidereal universe. (This is still a blog and if I am feeling a little prone to hyperbole, that is entirely up to me. Also, it is far from clear at this point as to the nature of whatever cases I may or may not be making. All will become clear soon, for some value of clear.)

Take for example the transplanted erstwhile, would-be gentleman who so enjoyed hunting rabbits that he imported a few and put them in his woods in his little corner of the Outback; the plan being to then shoot them all. (Apparently this ‘flaming galah’ or, if you prefer ‘drongo’ (these are just two more colourful Aussie critters, and indicate just how brightly-hued even the language is downunder) thought that the giant Australian Hopping Mouse was a bit too hoppy or rodenty for true sport. Maybe he just loved (or hated) them waskly wabbits.)

Obviously, a modern 21st century enlightened person like ourselves is acutely aware of the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘few rabbits’. Interestingly, the problem was then compounded by the clever introduction of a disease called myxomatosis; naturally, this has created about a trillion... (Yes, I’m just making up the numbers. I could have said googleplex, or mega gazillion for all it really matters, right? Hey, how come my spell-checker thinks gazillion is ok, but googleplex isn’t?)... myxomatosis resistant rabbits to share the outback with the hopping mice. Who could have guessed?

Perhaps less difficult to understand (and a bit easier to forgive) was the creation by the Royal navy of a supply yard on the coast of Banana-Bender land (sometimes called Queensland). The RN was thinking that sailors in these waters might enjoy a bit of meat from time to time and brought in a few water buffalo from Indochina. The plan was to keep them penned up properly and so on. But by the end of the 20th century, there were herds of 20,000 water buffalo wandering back and forth across Northern Territory and Queensland. Last I heard, the plan is to catch them all and ship them back to Siam. I am not entirely sure they’ve checked this plan with the government of Siam, but it sounds good. What could possibly go wrong?

Finally, (Moreover, when I say ‘finally’ I’m probably lying or, as they say these days 'blogging') there is the fabulous story of the cane toad. This has to rank among everyone’s favourites, a true masterpiece of ‘stretching one’s ability to suspend one’s disbelief’. Apparently, somewhere in Oz they were having a problem with scarab beetles.

(Wait a minute! Are they not from Egypt? Sounds like they should be from Egypt…)

So someone noticed that in Hawaii, there was a critter called the cane toad that ate scarab beetles. (Since Hawaii is not part of Australia, I see no point in wondering why there were cane toads, scarab beetles or for that matter sugar cane in Hawaii. Well, I do see a point, maybe later...)

I’ve seen scarab beetles and I find it easy enough to believe that it might be difficult to find anything willing to eat them, but there you go: apparently if you’re looking for a critter willing to dine on scarab beetles, the cane toad is your man (well critter). It is a short leap to think “here’s a good idea: We’ll bring cane toads to Oz and they can eat the beetles… problem solved.”

(Actually I think there may have been some snakes involved in this story too… all things considered, it’s a bit like the old woman (man?) who swallowed a fly… something about catching a spider etc. Of course, in that story, I think she died.)

I gather the scarab-beetle problem actually was solved. However, here we come across an implication that, not only is everything connected to everything else, but every problem is also connected to every other problem.

I think in this case, the problem is that no one allowed for the possibility that there would be leftover cane toads. Now a platypus is a kind of leftover… but it’s cute and fluffy and you feel sorry for it; a cane toad is not that sort of leftover at all. A cane toad is fat, ugly, bald, warty and full of noxious poison.

The cane toad has a unique survival strategy: you eat one you die. Now on the face of it, this doesn’t seem like a survival strategy at all. Here’s this cane toad sitting in the belly of a crocodile thinking ‘well, ok, but at least the crock is dead now’. The problem with this is that as dead as the crock may be, the toad is still well, also croaked. There’s no handy emergency exit out of a crock belly (also, as bad as crock manners may be, they do mostly chew their food a bit, so the ‘sitting in the belly and thinking’ bit is just wossname… poetic licence). The point here is that as a survival strategy, being poisonous is not quite enough… as a vengeance thing, it’s fine, but as survival it falls short, by one. What you really need is to be two cane toads and then be the one on the left… the one that doesn’t get eaten. Then you have something. Of course, the crock could probably manage to eat several cane toads in one sitting before coming to the horrible realisation that: “Hey! Not good…” so that means that you might need to be several cane toads, but the principal is the same. As a survival strategy, this has limitations.

Fortunately for the cane toad, these limitations prove very manageable. I expect this has something to do with breeding in insane numbers and hopping about quite a bit.

(Which, incidentally reminds me of an almost completely unrelated and irrelevant experience I had GMing ‘by the book’ Acme-brand role-playing… the character came into a room and encountered eighty toads (I don’t recall if they were cane toads, but I’m not sure it matters. Having worked my way though all applicable rules, and examined the options, the character decided to just step on them all. Being a closed space and all, this proved simple, albeit messy, and because he opted not to eat them, he was immune to any poisons that might or might not have been there. The toads were First Level beasts so he got 8,000 Experience Points which struck me as rather too much of a reward for too little effort. Unfortunately, Australia can be referred to as the exact opposite of a ‘closed space’ so this approach is not going to clear up the cane toad problem.)

So we finally come back to the title of the piece.

I am turning into a Cane Toad. I can explain why, but first, the story so far. After all, some of you may not have heard all of it, and some of you may not care at all. In the latter case, I assemble the whole saga in one place so that you can efficiently ignore it.

Back in January 2006 (nearly a year ago now), A veritable slew of doctors told me that I had an inappropriate onc (lump) in my belly (which I named Mal). They hacked it out with sharp knives and I got ‘better’. This led to a strategy that I call ‘scan and chop’. This meant that every three months or so, I would get a CT-scan and if another Mal sowed up, I’d get it chopped out. This strategy worked perfectly except that it went wrong in one significant way. When a new Mal showed up, it was two Mals that soon turned into more like half a dozen Mals, and they grew from infancy to the size of (small) housecats in a matter of four months (this reminds me of Aussie wabbits).

This called for a new plan called chemotherapy. Now I grew up in the sixties, (Come to think of it, I also grew up in the seventies, eighties, nineties and noughts) so, to my ears, chemotherapy does not sound all that bad. However, these ‘drugs’ aren’t really drugs, they are perfectly ordinary toxins designed to kill cells; and the cells they kill first are the fast-growing ones (well that’s the plan). Well, ok, this includes hair, but it also includes, hopefully, all them wascly wabbits. Well, it could work, right?

Well, so now, as I sit here in a hospital in the charming municipality of Surrey, BC, I am thinking that my belly is a bit like a war, not just any war, it’s like the First World War at about the time the combatants started chucking mustard gas at each other. It is like Flanders in 1917. (Which as any student of military history knows, was a campaign famous for it’s brilliant and innovative strategy and tactics.)

More significantly, the process is turning me into a cane toad. I am fat, balding, ugly and full of noxious poisons. (I am having a t-shirt made to this effect: I am fat, bald, ugly and full of noxious poisons. Eat me at your own risk.)

While the process is not yet complete, I can clearly see where it is going, and I have asked my highly-qualified daughter to construct a visual aid (using the very latest “scientific” hardware and software) to illustrate the process as we now clearly understand its progress.

The first picture shows what I looked like on 2007-01-02 (after at least 75% of my hair had fallen out).

The other pictures show what I am going to look like over the next weeks/months. We estimate the final ‘most cane toady’ stage will be achieved sometime in February or March (but not being experts, we might be off by several microns, gills, leagues or even a metric furlong).

Apparently then my hair will grow back and I will most likely look like a curly-headed cane toad.

I don’t actually have an ending for this blog. It’s a sort of a true (if twisted) news update thing with clever and purposeful structure, so I suppose I could argue it doesn’t need one, and can’t really have one, partly because all the good endings are being used by stories with all their polls closed already. I did intend, and still at some point do intend, to write about the monarchy, and at some point, I want to write about health care, and politics and international relations… even if I can’t find much about these things that are particularly funny. However, the purpose of these rambles is to ramble, and to get them done. So in that spirit…

Art by Arien Crossby © 2007