(Nevertheless, there are reports of brave or foolhardy dogs licking cane toads to get a brief high. Multiple cane-toad experts told me, sternly, that this is not recommended for humans.)

Tilford started Toad Busters in 2017 to supplement her income as a high-school science teacher. Her most memorable job was on a property near Miami. The woman who lived there had nine cats, which she fed by dumping almost a bag of cat food every night. Cane toads normally eat bugs, but they are happy to eat pet food, too. The toads were so fat, Tilford said, “they couldn’t even jump.” She ended up catching more than 130 by hand.

Tilford takes some of the toads she removes to her toad dealer, because, it turns out, there is a demand for the creatures. The toads can end up in research labs, on biology-class dissection tables, or as pets in Europe, where it’s generally too cold for the toads to survive in the wild. The rest, about 30 percent, she estimates, have to be humanely euthanized according to American Veterinary Medical Association guidelines—first anesthetized with a benzocaine spray and then put in a freezer. (Here are step-by-step instructions, for anyone looking to deal with cane toads on their own.) “I really hate killing anything,” Tilford said, “but it’s illegal to release them because all I’ll be doing is spreading more of the invasive species.”

Cane toads have adapted beautifully to the Florida suburbs, so a lot of Tilford’s work also involves getting people to rethink their suburban backyard. No more cat food, for example. Pet poop can also attract insects, which can in turn attract toads. As do lights. And toads love to breed in ornamental pools of water, such as the lake in the affected Palm Beach Garden neighborhood. For “these larger communities that want to build these beautiful ponds and want to have houses on ponds,”Tilford said, “this is almost a pest-control service.” The cane toads aren’t going away, but they can be managed like mosquitoes or rats.

Read: The very long war between snakes and newts

Dealing with toads amounts to a nuisance in Florida, but they can also create more dramatic problems. In Australia—where they were also deliberately introduced in the 1930s to protect sugarcane—they are a genuine scourge.

The issue is that Australia has no native toad species, so none of the predators knew to avoid the toxic toads. As the cane toads advanced east to west across the continent, “they left a wake of dead animals in their paths,” says Sean Doody, an ecologist at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg who has studied cane toads in Australia. Turtles, lizards, and crocodiles just started dying out, which was good news for their prey. “If you were a small species that was previously being eaten, suddenly you’re on a honeymoon,” says Rick Shine, a biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who has also studied the impact of cane toads on Australian wildlife.

The ecological impact isn’t quite so dramatic in Florida, which has plenty of native toads. (As Shine puts it, “Cane toads are just bigger and uglier than local toads.”) They simply have to be dealt with: Last night, Toad Busters’ three-person crew spent three hours picking up hundreds of baby toads in Palm Beach Gardens. Tilford has also noticed native species, such as green tree frogs, starting to come back to areas where she’s removed cane toads. And the humans, of course, are happier too.