Re:[OT?]Dangerous Alian Wildlife

Beth wrote, re Cane Toads:

> > The truly, truly desperate in search of a high have been
> > known to boil them up and drink the toxin-laden result. It contains
> > hallucinagens as well as a variety of purely ppoisonous alkaloids.
> 
> Just don't touch/dissect one and absent-mindedly rub your lip.... not
being
> able to feel said lip for 24 hours is no fun!

I suspect that's from personal experience, right?

OK, the header's incomplete. The post is about dangerous Austr-Alian
wildlife.
 
Gotta be careful talking about poisonous beasties down here: the Yanks
will get the impression that everything's venomous. Not true. Neither
the man-eating 20 ft Great White Sharks nor the 20ft Saltwater crocs are
poisonous (though some are a LOT bigger than 20 ft - though that's big
enough). Ok, so the spiders are poisonous, as are the scorpions, snakes,
jellyfish, seasnails, sea urchins, octopi, toads, even the (male)
platypus. But not *all* the poisons are fatal. Or at least, not always.
And you may die from infection from the bite of a goanna or parentie,
but they're not poisonous either.

Now having damaged the Australian Tourist Industry yet again....

Just some thoughts though for SG2: suppose an alian - sorry - alien
beastie or plant secreted a powerful hallucinagen as a pheremone? Get
too close, and the Umpire starts putting Pink Elephants or whatever on
the table.

And one more thing. I can imagine colonists in the GZGverse having the
same perverse pride in their menagerie of dangerous beasties that we do
in Oz. Personally, I think the Grizzly Bear is quite bad enough thanks,
and there's Mountain Lions fercrisake. You'd no more expect to see a
Croc in Sydney outside a zoo than you would a Mountain Lion in
Saskatchewan, or a Grizzly in Arizona.
OK, they have sharks. And the deadly Sydney Funnelweb spider. And
Redbacks. Death Adders. Blue Ringed Octopi. Coneshells. But that's all
that I've personally seen within 2 km of the house I used to live in.
Apart from the really common red-bellied brown snakes, and the Bulldog
Ants, and....

Let's just say the Saltwater Crocs are one of our lines of defence in
the North.