Toad Media
MEDIA -Toad-busting in the Top End
By Kate Sieper
In 1935, 102 cane toads were introduced into Australia out of South
America. They were brought in to control a beetle causing trouble
in Queensland's sugarcane crops, but ended up a cautionary tale
of biological control.
While they grow to a nice size, easy to hit with a car tyre, cane
toads are prolific breeders. And more to the point, they're poisonous.
So not only do they eat a lot of food, but they kill anything that
eats them, from goannas to birds. The toll they've taken on the
biodiversity of places like Kakadu is yet to be fully measured.
Nonetheless, 71 years since the cane toad first called Australia
home, a group of volunteers have drawn a line in the sand, and said,
'the toad will not cross'.
It is the country's first concerted and extended effort to stop
the advance of the cane toad, with volunteers spending October out
around Timber Creek catching toads. And if numbers are anything
to go by, they've certainly been successful, with a total of 48,318
toads caught.
Graeme Sawyer is a 'Stop the Toad' co-ordinator and he says they
are using the terrain, the climate and the toad's own need for water
against them.
"If you put a wet rag and a cane toad out in the sun they
both lose water at about the same speed. And as a result of that
cane toads need to find water every couple of days.
"Now the research they did indicated every four days, but
it may even be worse than that out here, they may need water every
second day or something like that. So when you look at a floodplain
like this system out here and you need water, you don't have much
in the way of options.
"And for a cane toad the only option they have is, they have
to come and sit around the edge of these waterholes; and because
these waterholes drop, and what we're sitting on is bare ground,
and when you walk past here with a bright spotlight at night, cane
toads are really, really easy to see.
"It is a combination of cane toad biology and the way this
landscape works ecologically and weatherwise that makes me think
we can possibly stop toads out here."
He says they don't expect this to be a once-off effort, but they
are prepared to push back the frontline every Dry season until the
scientists come up with a more permanent answer.
"The plan is to push the frontline back from the west to east
as far as possible; back to the other side of Timber Creek hopefully,
and that way you're creating a buffer zone. And then the toads will
probably flood back in to that buffer zone in the course of the
following Wet season, and then in the following Dry season you can
hopefully repeat this process and wipe them out again.
CSIRO are saying at the moment they are two to three years from
finishing their research on a solution to cane toads and the hope
is that you can hold the frontline or slow it up that much that
CSIRO will be able to step in and provide some extra resources before
they hit WA."
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