The throaty brummmm of bullfrogs is a sound that brings comfort to anyone in the Eastern or Southern US. It’s not typically a sound people on the West are used to hearing. Still, they have been hearing it more frequently in recent years, as this invasive apex predator has flourished in Western states, throwing ecosystems out of whack, according to a feature published by Vox.
A lot of that seems to be happening lately. I recently wrote about what happened when gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone after being purposely and wrongly removed decades earlier.
The Vox article states that bullfrogs were introduced to the West in the 1800s during the California Gold Rush as a food source, specifically, for their meaty, surprisingly delicious legs. The plan to farm them fizzled out since raising cannibalistic amphibians that eat everything and are prone to disease isn’t great business.
But the frogs stuck around anyway. And then they spread—a lot, and all over the American West.
Ecological Chaos Unleashed as Bullfrogs Swarm the American West
Today, American bullfrogs are in almost every Western state, from California to Colorado, and their numbers are near impossible to keep down since one female can lay 25,000 eggs in a lifetime.
Thanks to their biology and a human-altered landscape of permanent, warm water bodies, such as irrigation canals, they’ve exploded in number. All the factors that enable human colonization in new lands have allowed bullfrogs to thrive.
There’s also the fact that bullfrogs will eat anything. They don’t discriminate. Snakes, baby turtles, birds, each other—they don’t give a s**t. They’re like Pac-Man or Kirby; if they’re hungry and you’re in their way, you are their next potential meal.
When places like Florida are overrun with invasive pythons that were brought in by drug dealers and showboats and then released when those idiots realized they had no idea what to do with a 14-foot behemoth of a snake, the state institutes a state-sanctioned Python killing spree to reduce their numbers to help restore some much-needed ecological balance.
It’s not so easy with bullfrogs. They’ve tried. It’s time-consuming, labor-intensive, and almost always temporary. One pond cleared today is reinfested tomorrow. According to the report, if we wanted to harm them, we would probably have to cause some harm to their environments, which, as established, are all part of the ecosystem that allows us to thrive.
While some researchers made a dent in bullfrog numbers in Yosemite, culling over 16,000 bullfrogs from a couple of water bodies, this effort ushered in the return of native turtles and frogs. However, it wasn’t easy, and every environment they inhabit brings its unique challenges.
The thing is, bullfrogs aren’t necessarily villains. They’re just excellent survivors. Maybe too good. And they reshape entire ecosystems with their mere presence, and all because we reshaped ecosystems to meet our needs, unknowingly creating thousands of ecologies that were seemingly custom-built to encourage a bullfrog baby boom.
We also probably should not have brought them to the West. That was a mistake. That’s our bad.
The post Bullfrogs Are Taking Over the American West and Wrecking the Ecosystem appeared first on VICE.
