Rangers found a monster cane toad beside the Conway Circuit last week. Photo: Department of Environment and Science
Rangers at Conway National Park in Australia discovered a potentially record-breaking monster cane toad last week, the Queensland government's Department of Environment and Science said Friday.
The intrigue: The so-called “Toadzilla” weighed-in at 2.7 kilograms (about 5.9 pounds), “which could be a new record,” ranger Kylee Gray said in a news release.
- The current Guinness World Record for largest toad, set in 1991, is 2.65 kilograms (about 5.13 pounds).
Details: Rangers stopped when they noticed snakes on the track ahead of them, the department said in a news release. They also noticed something else.
- “I reached down and grabbed the cane toad and couldn’t believe how big and heavy it was,” Gray said, per the release.
- “We dubbed it Toadzilla, and quickly put it into a container so we could remove it from the wild.”
- The department said in a tweet it had euthanized the toad "due to the environmental damage they cause."
Context: Monster cane toads were introduced into Queensland in 1936 to control the cane beetle population, the department said.
- However, they became a threatening species that can be poisonous to wildlife, having caused extinctions of some predators in the past, government officials said.
- Cane toads often weigh about 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) and can colonize a number of habitats.
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