Florida Tries to Deal With Invasion of Exotic Critters

Walking catfish, poisonous toads and armadillos are a few of the foreign creatures that have invaded Florida and created headaches for naturalists and residents, a wildlife expert says.

Fire ants from Argentina, flesh-eating piranhas and monkeys are other examples of the state’s many exotic species, said Wayne King, a curator of reptiles at the Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus.

“An introduced species may literally outfeed our native species and spread to become real pests, and then we end up spending millions, if not billions, of dollars trying to control it,” he said.

Foreign species often compete aggressively with native species because the Florida environment doesn’t have the natural predators or diseases to keep them in check, he said.

Florida has more exotic creatures than any state except Hawaii, largely because Miami is the nation’s transportation hub for Latin America and a base for the tropical pet industry, King said.

“Iguanas, snakes, toads and tropical fish--you name it, they come into the pet industry, occasionally escaping from broken crates at the airport,” he said.

Tampa and Ft. Myers are centers for the nation’s aquarium industry, importing more than 200 million tropical fish and breeding twice as many.

“We have more species of tropical fish introduced in Florida than anywhere else in the United States,” King said. “Some don’t cause problems and some cause enormous problems.”

The walking catfish of Southeast Asia, for example, walks across land to occupy Florida ponds, where it eats the eggs of resident bream and bass.

Piranhas from South America have been found in south Florida lakes.

Some species have been deliberately introduced. The agricultural industry brought a giant toad to Clewiston to control click beetles in the sugar cane fields, only to find that it also displaces native toads, he said.

The voracious Bufo marinus has poisons in its skin to protect it from predators, causing dogs that bite the toad to get sick, he said.

Great lengths sometimes are taken to control foreign pests. The U.S. government sprayed massive doses of pesticides from airplanes when fire ants native to Argentina reached the southeastern United States during the 1950s, he said.

Armadillos appeared at least twice in Florida, once spreading west from a roadside zoo near Titusville during the 1930s. Native to South and Central America, the armadillo also spread east from Texas into Florida. The two groups are expected eventually to meet in the state’s Panhandle, King said.

“The impact of armadillos is pretty severe because they root up the forest floor the same as pigs do,” King said.

Monkeys, another early introduction, were brought to Silver Springs by the film industry for the Tarzan movies.

“They put the monkeys in the trees, but then they couldn’t catch them--so they were just left there,” he said.