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Toad MediaMEDIA RELEASE16 March 2007Toad fence looks promisingA group fighting the inexorable advance of cane toads toward the north of WA may have found the cane toad’s Achilles heel: their poor jumping ability. Tests using 60cm high shade cloth attached to a 4.2km stretch of station fencing have succeeded in deflecting the toads' advance. Graeme Sawyer of the Stop The Toad Foundation (STTF) (with support from the WA Department of Environment and Conservation) has begun the first major field trial of the shade cloth barrier near Timber Creek in the Northern Territory. The north-south fence runs along the boundary of Gregory National Park, at the eastern end of the buffer zone where the STTF has focussed its efforts to stop the western advance of the cane toads. Traps were set at intervals on each side of the fence to catch the toads as they hopped along seeking an opening to pass the shade cloth barrier. In the six days after the tests were started on January 24 the traps had captured 171 toads, and 85 more had been caught along the fenceline by STTF staff, volunteers and the Muyalee Women's Rangers. Eighty per cent of the toads collected during the six days were on the eastern side of the fence. STTF now wants to explore the potential use of similar deflection fences at strategic targets such as refuge waterholes in the dry season to deny toads access to water. "If we can combine the potential of such barriers with the landscape-scale impacts of STTF's Great Toad Muster, which removed nearly 50,000 toads from the front line in 2006, there is a very real chance that cane toads can be delayed from reaching WA for long enough to allow CSIRO to develop a biological solution," said Mr Sawyer. A report on the trial is available at
http://www.stopthetoad.org.au/main/publications.php |
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