The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (16 page)

Some frogs are attractive. Bullfrogs aren’t. They are green or brown and always blotchy. A really big one would have a twenty-centimetre body, with another twenty centimetres tacked on as legs. A bullfrog that big would weigh in at something approaching 750 grams. The sides of their heads are marked by huge eardrums and big, bulgy eyes. They have come to me in my nastier dreams.

American bullfrogs have been imported as pets and as accidental tag-alongs with goldfish. However, the introduction of bullfrogs has been mainly an issue of food. You might try to win your next Scrabble game with the word “ranarium,” a commercial operation where bullfrogs are raised for human consumption. These facilities do not require a lot of space and need only a modest initial investment, and have been tried with varying degrees of success around the world for over a century.

Curiously, it seems that every attempt to raise bullfrogs for food had an export market in mind. Locals generally seem to prefer steaks and burgers to frogs’ legs. Is it possible that no one really wants to eat them? Many countries have found that the market was overestimated, and bullfrog farms sit abandoned. Frogs then sneak away into the night and cause trouble.

Introduced American bullfrogs have been reported willing to stuff down just about anything they can fit in their mouths, including native insects, other frogs, newts, fish, and crayfish. Among the more unlikely items found in their diet are grass snakes, young mink, small turtles, and ducklings. Bullfrog tadpoles are thought to
compete for food with the larval forms of native frogs, and adults have the potential to transmit diseases to which local amphibians have no natural resistance. Experts in Venezuela feel that the endangered La Carbonera stub-toed toad could be wiped out in months if American bullfrogs were to invade their habitat. Competition with American bullfrogs is most likely to have a negative impact on frog species that are most closely related to them, particularly other members of the same genus. For close relatives, hybridization is also possible. At a time when amphibians are under threat globally, introduced bullfrogs seem to be an additional problem that no one needs.

I
T WAS ROUGHLY AT THIS POINT
that Lisa and I joined the global transplantation of living organisms by moving from Canada to Australia. Lisa had completed a series of post-doctoral fellowships in the field of biomedical physiology and was poised to become a professor in her own right. It had become apparent that the chances of finding professorial positions in our respective fields in the city of Calgary were remote, and so we began to look at alternatives. Among those was the possibility that I would allow myself to be a kept husband and rely on my spouse for my next meal. When Lisa interviewed for and was subsequently offered an outstanding post at James Cook University in north Queensland, the correct route seemed obvious. At least it seemed obvious to us. When my colleagues found out that I was chucking in a position that was virtually guaranteed for life to move to a hemisphere that I hadn’t even visited, their responses were of two sorts. I must be very brave or I must be very stupid.

Australia is covered with introduced species, but it doesn’t have American bullfrogs. Of all the places that I might have chosen to spy on bullfrogs, I chose Uruguay for three reasons. First, no one I knew had ever been there. Second, I had recently completed a twelve-session night course in elementary Spanish, and although I had always felt like the most dim-witted student in the class, I wanted to try out some of my new-found knowledge.

Finally, research had just been completed on the invader in Uruguay, and the country’s principle amphibian researcher had promised to show me around.

Unless you are a member of the Uruguayan military, you will find it nearly impossible to fly to Uruguay without flying to Argentina first. For me, this meant a flight from Sydney to Buenos Aires, the closest transportation hub to Uruguay’s capital city, Montevideo. The Pacific Ocean is really, really big, and our plane seemed in no hurry to get to Buenos Aires. I passed the time by constructing naughty expressions in Spanish using my phrasebook. Nothing I came up with would be naughty enough to get my face slapped. However, I made a mental note not to use the word
coger.
In Spain the verb means “to take” or “to catch.” In South America it is a much cruder version of the expression “to have carnal knowledge of.” Asking a local where I might be able to engage in coitus with a bus could conceivably get me into a bit of trouble.

Before departing for Montevideo, I enjoyed a couple of free days wandering the streets of Buenos Aires. I found my way to the Cementerio de la Recoleta, populated by the earthly remains of presidents, physicians, Nobel Prize winners, writers, diplomats, and other mucky-mucks. I discovered that coffee culture in Argentina means
café con leche
(coffee with a large quantity of steamed milk), a glass of water, a glass of orange juice, and tasty chocolate wafers. Florida Avenue was alive and electrified late into the evening. Street vendors hawked beaded work, quick portraits, more beaded work, cigarette lighters, and additional beaded work.

Indeed, there was only one great challenge for me in Buenos Aires. In a country full of ravenous carnivores, a good vegetarian restaurant is a rare and precious thing. And so for an evening meal I set off for La Esquina de las Flores (The Corner of the Flowers). When I arrived at the address on Córdoba, I found that my dining opportunity had been replaced by a gaping construction site. Luckily, I had a plan B. The restaurant Rubia y Negra (Blond and Black) on Libertad was said to brew eight varieties of beer.
In its place I found a hairdressing salon. For an instant, I toyed with plan C. Ligure on Juncal was said to serve the best
ranas a la provenzal,
bullfrog legs in garlic, in all of Argentina. Bullfrogs? What an opportunity. Not that I wanted to eat bullfrog legs; most vegetarians don’t. But perhaps I could find a fellow patron who had ordered them and could then ask how they tasted. Fat chance.

I had hoped to visit another introduced species before I left Argentina. Just as it had been introduced to Vancouver in the nineteenth century, the Crested Myna had been found in Argentina since 1982. In the hopes of seeing it, I contacted local bird enthusiast Mark Pear-man. Although we were not able to dovetail our schedules, he gave me all of the details that I needed to find mynas myself at the Plaza Paso in the city of La Plata, fifty kilometres south of Buenos Aires. Mark warned me about a lack of signposts, awkward exit roads, dangerous ghettos, and general violence and security problems in La Plata. Despite the city’s promise of Belle Epoque and Flemish Renaissance architecture, a great natural history museum, and convenient bus service, I decided against a detour to La Plata.

B
E ADVISED
—on the ferry between Buenos Aires and Montevideo,
turista
class isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds. Bring a book. I hadn’t. I tried to keep track of the announcements made in Spanish, and most of them were followed by the same commentary in English so that I could check my translation. The video highlighting the ferry’s safety features made disaster look jolly fun. The lifejackets appeared a lot more substantial than the flimsy thing promised on inflight safety videos. Sliding down a chute from the ferry to a waiting life raft seemed like a thoroughly survivable adventure. I had always felt that if an airliner fell from 11,000 metres with me on it, my last concern was likely to be whether my lifejacket had an operating light and whistle.

In the months leading up to the trip, my correspondence with ecologist Gabriel Laufer had been spotty, so I was both delighted and relieved when he approached me outside the customs hall in Montevideo. In a way that I cannot properly articulate, I immediately
felt as though I was making a lifelong friend. He shook my hand firmly, tossed my bags into the back of his truck, and we set off for my hotel.

I got an informal tour of Montevideo en route. Gabriel pointed out the building of the university’s veterinary school as we passed it. It was, with the support of the government, the first institution to promote the idea of bullfrog farms in Uruguay, and did substantial research on cultivation techniques suitable for the country. Like so many people using English as a second tongue, Gabriel downplayed his grasp of the language, although it seemed lucid and coherent. In explaining why a street, Avenida 18 de Julio, was named after a date, he stumbled when trying to translate the word
constitución
into English. “Constitution,” I said. He corrected my use of the word
bambino
(“No, that’s Italian,” he said), and sorted out my confusion of the words
nombre
and
numero.
We agreed that we would meet early the following morning to travel to a site of bullfrog introduction. We also agreed that Gabriel and his wife, Adriana, would meet me for dinner that evening at nine o’clock.

I was far too excited to sit still, and so after dropping my bags at the hotel, I set off. I wanted to explore, explore, explore. I first selected an
al fresco
establishment on a side street, and taking the advice of a fellow diner ordered melted mozzarella on a thick pizzalike crust. The prices looked steep, until I remembered that the Uruguayan peso was trading at twenty-to-one with a dollar. Compared to prices at home, everything on the menu was dirt cheap. A long string of very young children came to beg at my table, but none were pushy or impolite when I turned them down.

After wandering slowly through the streets of central Montevideo, I came to rest under the shade trees of the Plaza del Entrevero. I spied Rock Doves and very pale House Sparrows, but none of the other introduced birds (European Greenfinches, European Goldfinches, and Common Waxbills) that I had been told to expect in Uruguay. How delightful that some older park users felt free to feed the birds.

A fellow on the next park bench finished off a joint and then quietly picked at his guitar. In an accent that suggested he had spent considerable time smoking joints in the U.S., or watching far too much American television, he said: “So, are you lost in Paradise?”

I replied that I wasn’t sure if it was Paradise, but that I certainly wasn’t lost. “What about you?”

“No, I live here.”

“Does that mean that it can’t be Paradise?”

He pondered my question for a minute, gave up, and changed the topic. He had just been to see the Mausoleo de Artigas, crypt of José Gervasio Artigas, a nineteenth-century resistance fighter, in the Plaza Independencia.

“They dug him up, and put him in a crypt with an armed guard. Do you know about him?” I replied that I did. “Well, he’s too far from the Earth, you know what I mean?” I said that I did, but I didn’t.

“If they scatter me over there,” he said, pointing to a spot about twenty metres away, “and it makes the grass greener, then I figure I’ve done my part.”

I wondered if, when he was a baby, his mother looked down on him in his bassinet and said, “I hope that he strives to be fertilizer.”

At the appointed hour, Gabriel and Adriana arrived at the hotel, and we drove to a lovely beachfront restaurant. Adriana used English flawlessly, having spent several of her formative years in Massachusetts. Over a full-bodied Uruguayan red wine and a great meal, I learned a lot about the country that tourist bureaus try to ignore. For instance, I heard that the Uruguay economy is sufficiently weak that many families require four or five jobs just to keep moving forward.

University entrance in Uruguay is free—my favourite price for post-secondary education. However, Gabriel explained that this isn’t necessarily a good thing; even with free tuition, many qualified people cannot afford books, accommodation, and all of the other costs associated with university life. He suggested that a suitable
system would be one of pay-what-you-can-afford, with the revenue generated going to scholarships and bursaries.

At one time, the Universidad de la República was one of the best, perhaps even the single best institution of its kind in South America. However, with a combination of state-of-emergency, suppression of civil liberties, and military government in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, the focus of the university had swerved wildly to satisfy political ends. Even with a return to proper national elections and social and economic reforms, more than two decades later the university is struggling to return to the ideals of scholarship.

Gabriel had a lot to contribute to my knowledge of invasive species in Uruguay. Just the week before, he said, an exotic jellyfish had been discovered in a freshwater lake. Similarly, a small flock of toucans from Central America had recently been spotted. I heard that eucalyptus trees from Australia and acacias from Africa were grown in many parts of Uruguay, including places of special ecological importance. Gabriel used the expression “green deserts” to explain the impact of the exotic trees on native fauna and flora. We also spoke about skinny-dipping, Canada’s second-most-popular spectator sport. Apparently, two weeks earlier an Australian tourist had been arrested in Uruguay for swimming nude.

I am undoubtedly the luckiest man alive. Everyone who has met my wife knows what I mean. It is a tribute to my phenomenal luck that I had landed in Montevideo on the first day of Carnaval. Gabriel and Adriana suggested that we drive over to the all-night parade, the Desfile de las Llamadas, to take in part of the evening’s festivities. We had no difficulty finding parking just two blocks from the parade route. Those two blocks were populated with folks smoking spliffs and trees propping up peeing men.

How could I have allowed half a century of my life to pass without taking in Montevideo’s Carnaval celebrations? Both sides of the street were packed with as many bodies as would fit. The most fortunate souls hung from balconies overlooking the parade route. Community groups had pulled together to create the most outrageous
spectacle they could. Flag bearers swept impossibly large curtains in bold and contrasting colours. The crowd was draped in ecstasy when each flag was dragged over their heads. These marchers were followed by beautiful women in the skimpiest of glittering costumes; I cannot imagine how many birds gave their feathers for the headdresses. Each group pulsed up the street. The nearly naked women were followed by drummers, row after row, pounding away on their huge instruments. No power could keep me from joining in the clapping. I could feel the drumming in my face, in my chest, and in my hips. Words like “thrubbing” and “orgiastic” came to mind. Some groups had teams of tango-dancing couples who didn’t miss a step while keeping up with the remainder of the army. As the marching party swept one way, another small army swam the other, hawking candy floss, candied apples, glow sticks, and cheap plastic masks.