Originally posted by Flipside
LOL
Natural selection, you see, it's not so much 'survival of the fittest; and 'He who lives, breeds'.
[/b]
We are actually just genes' reproduction/survival facilities, says Dawkins.
Still bloody irresponsible to introduce a poisonous skinned toad to the environment in the first place though. We are paying the price for that in various forms over and over again
[/B]
Oh Australia, you land of various failed introduction attempts.
I mean, now they have, what: foxes, rats, toads, camels, rabbits, cats, those being the first few that spring to my mind. When looking at toads, the swiftness of adaptation might look fast, but let's see:
Under those circumstances, where a big part of seemingly consumable food is actually poisonous, ANY, and I do mean ANY, adaptation to have raised resistance to toads' poison would be so immensively profitable for the individual and "it's genes" that it's continuity would be practically guaranteened. Once such mutation takes place, it can quite rapidly establish itself throughout the entire population, especially if the competitors tend to die. Not many successive mutations in nearby populations are needed after the resiliance becomes a dominant feature in said snake populations, thuse even FURTHER increasing the populations efficiency, as they are now able to exploit a consumable that has previously been usable only once/user.
edit: as Aldo pointed out, the entire above point is bull, as the snakes don't actually eat the toads, apparently. Go me.
Or you could just replace the poison resistance with head size, and the point would be roughly the same. Whatever. I am sick.