American bullfrogs a nuisance to Europe

I was North of Amsterdam in the countryside a while back and at night I could hear frogs that sounded a bit like bullfrogs. ‘Wow, do you have bullfrogs here too? Then I started telling of my Canadian summer camp evenings as a kid with the sound of bullfrogs lulling us to sleep.

Apparently in the Netherlands and now in Belgium, the American bullfrog is a nuisance imported from North America and they are being trapped and killed. Home garden shops started selling bullfrogs a few years back and they ended up in the wild after skipping their pre-fab ponds. Now, there’s an import ban on bullfrogs, as they eat tons of food a day, including the regular, smaller frogs (in Dutch, called ‘kikker’) they wouldn’t normally be eating.

The Belgians don’t have an import ban of bullfrogs yet and the problem just started, while the Dutch do have a ban and the problem is going away. Seems like the Belgians should make a move soon before those frogs cross more borders.

(Link: nos.nl)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 11:04 am and is filed under Animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: bullfrogs, frogs