Overkill

last updated 8 January 2015

Le Haillan, France

Snipers using rifles with telescopic sights and silencers have been dispatched to the French countryside to blast invaders from the U.S.—bullfrogs. A man near Bordeaux stocked a pond with the bellowing frogs in 1968, “and a few years later every stretch of water in the region was full of them,” said Luc Gueugneau, a government wildlife regulator. The bullfrogs, which typically weigh more than a pound, quickly began eating up their smaller local cousins, as well as shellfish, insects, and baby birds. Efforts to scoop up tadpoles in nets were only modestly successful, but officials say that hunting breeding adults should eliminate the pests within 10 years.