Cannibal cane toads in Australia pretty much shot up this week’s science news charts.
So this week’s science news was pretty much dominated by those cannibalistic cane toads in Australia, but there were some other important science news happening this week worthy of a look. The week started off with news that cracks had been found in the International Space Station (ISS) and ended with a Firefly Aerospace rocket explosion. In between, there was some other space news including the ancient brown dwarf called The Accident careening through space at half a million miles an hour and speculation about Dyson Spheres around black holes powering advanced alien civilizations. Lets review the week that was in science! It turns out that invasive cane toad tadpoles in Australia are eating their younger siblings and cousins so quickly and in such large numbers that it’s creating an intergenerational biological arms race to see which can evolve quick enough to beat the other. The toads, which were brought from South America to Australia in the 1930s are highly poisonous and have no natural predators in Australia (which is saying something), are 30 times more likely to seek out fellow defenseless cane toad hatchlings to eat while tadpoles than their South American cousins. This has caused the hatchlings to develop even faster to reach the tadpole stage themselves so they won’t get eaten, making the cannibal tadpoles even more aggressive to eat what remaining hatchlings there are in the small pools they were born in.
