Cane Toads

The Cane Toad, orginally from Venezuela in South America, was introduced from canefields in Hawaii into Australian Queensland canefields for the purposes of controlling cane beetles in 1935. (Bufo Marinus means Large Marine! and they can live in brackish water that a frog could not survive in.)

Sadly it was not particularly interested in cane beatles (the Brayback beetle) compared to more attractive alternatives and has moved out of the canefields and is spreading throughout Queensland happily eating small native Australian fauna like frogs, lizards, small snakes and small marsupials along the way. It grows as big as a softball or a small football and is many times larger than the largest Australian frogs or toads. It is a voracious eater and will eat literally anything that fits in it's mouth.

It is now established in the bordering states and is advancing at a rate of approximately 30 kilometers per year toward Kakadu National Park, a famous world heritage listed wetlands in the Northern Territory, and south toward a one of Australia's biggest cities, Sydney (see map).

Bufo toads are very poisonous and a predator that eats them will be killed. A predator that eats a toad will die within a few minutes to twenty minutes depending on on it's size. The poison which is carried in the distinct bulbous sacks on the toads "shoulders" behind his head called paratoid glands contains a steroid that affects heart muscle. The effect on domestic dogs has been observed. Initially it burns the mucous membrane of the dogs mouth (gums) causing the dog to drool and foam and that's where the poison enters the bloodstream. It kills by elevating the heart rate and blood pressure to deadly levels. The advancing canetoads will progressively shell shock an unsuspecting environment, in particular they will come close to wiping out native quoll populations, poison large masses of goannas and disturb the food supply of many native animals.

Green Tree Frog tadpoles are shown on the left and the distinctive Cane Toad tadpoles on the right. Cane Toad tadpoles are uniformly dark with pointed narrow tails and note the protruding bullet shape at the front of the head. The native tadpole has a lighter underbelly and the tail betrays its fish origins. There is evidence that toad tadpoles living in a pond with native frog tadpoles will either kill the native frog tadpoles or inhibit their development in some way. In any event a cane toad lays thousands more eggs than a native frog and the mature toads eat native frogs so documenting the precise mechanism that leads to the frog decline it is a matter of semantics to me but doubtless important to research.

Bufo toads are voracious eaters and will eat anything they can fit in their mouths.They grow to 23 cm (ie 9.5 inches) in length. This is the size of a dinner plate or a football although typical ones moving around you see readily are the size of a softball conversely a native frog or toad might range from so small it would fit on a coin to the size of a hens egg and Bufo toads eat them all as well as small lizards, small snakes and marsupials.

Bufo toads eating habits indirectly kill the vertebrate wildlife that depends on the same food. many snakes and birds depend on frogs for their diet and also die off when their staple food source is depleted by cane toads.

CSIRO say that the density of cane toads here in Australia is 10 times the density in their native Venezuela.

Resesearchers are examining the possibility of introducing a pathogen which is specific to the cane toad and will not effect other native amphibians.
I will try to see where they stand with this but it sounds like wish list stuff to me
I will try to get a link to them. Maybe they need some support.

I have now seen some CSIRO material the staff who would be familiar with the work done to isolate viruses from cane toads in their native habitats of Venezuela and their effect on cane toads and native frogs in Australia as tested at the Australian Animal Health Laboritory's biocontainment facilities are:

Dr A Hyatt, CSIRO's Australian Animal Health Laboritory and Dr T Robinson, CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology.

Evidently The viruses proved effective in killing cane toad tadpoles but also killed one species of native frog. I suspect the work was completed in 1998 but would like to know status. Evidently a related strain of a virus from Venezuela was found in a small percentage of Australian cane toads.

CSIRO banner blurbs say the use of the virus (singular) was ruled out "because it killed Australian frogs". What virus? I'm sure different viruses (plural) were being looked at. From the reading and I wonder if it's been ruled out by scientists, managers, polititians or just journalistic hype. I imagine there is a lot to be gained "investigating controls" which is safe ground and gets a budget allocation. Equally there is probably not a real lot of motivation to get into "implimenting controls" which would involve some risk (to careers as well as) native frogs.

From ABC News on 25 May 1999: Australian investers sent a trial shipment of venom to China for trial as a replacement for venom presently being used in traditional medicine. One litre of the poison was obtained from 2500 toads collected in Cairns on the North Coast of Queensland, Australia. The consortium head is John Ratcliffe. It would be interesting to see where this stands.

* There is no program to eradicate cane toads in Australia.

* There is no program to slow the spread of cane toads in Australia.

Here Endeth the First Lesson

The Second Lesson

By now truely caring Aussies have added the Bufo toad, cane toad, Queensland cane toad, call it what you will, to the list of feral animals they kill on sight to try to minimise their impact. There I said it .. shock horror ..some people kill things. Interestingly some people believe their public opposition to killing cane toads ensures that are perceived by others as being morally, ethically, or intellectually superior. But in Australia there is another word for people who don't pull their weight in the community and that is "bludger".

It's been my experience that the people who go out and kill cane toads at night after work are the same people you find filling sandbags in a flood, cutting a fire break or helping put a tarpaulins over a storm damaged roofs and, suprise, suprise, the people opposed to the cane toad culls do not turn out in these community emergencies either. Some people will always be able to rationalise doing nothing but in the war against cane toads they have managed to crank it up to being a superior moral and intellectual stance.

Ok! ok! in answer to some enquiring emails ..yes! I have started making a list and collecting pics of feral animals which are killed in Australia for later inclusion ..and no! dingoes are not on it ..and yes! Queensland is part of Australia ..and no! in World War 2 we did not want to surrender Queensland to the Japanese, that would be a defeat, we were going to abandon it which would have been a strategic decision and totally different ..and yes! the Japanese do own a big chunk of Queensland now ..and no! we will not change Queensland's name if we become a republic ..and yes! I do think that cane toads have rights ..they have a right to live in Venuzuela!

This can't keep up. I'm going to have to start a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) list.

Now where was I? That's right ..killing cane toads on sight. Cane toads are very heavy and squat and they cannot hop or get through thick grass. They do congregate on roads, golf courses, public parks or domestic lawns and use shallow pools of water to breed, which they do readily and obliviously to everything else.

On the front line of the cane toad advance you might only see the odd one which is all the more reason to kill quickly before they get established and not "conduct studies" It is a holding operation now and I believe that with commitment their present rate of dispersal can be dramatically slowed up at least on the southern front which has a denser human population. Like a bush fire you get spot breakout's well in front of the line. This is due to toads being accidently brought south in loads carried by transport vehicles or some other mechanism associated with human transport systems. Good grief! one was found in Sydney which was at least 600 km ahead of the front. Work on containment can achieve heaps more to delay and save wildlife. Just like a bushfire ..work on the edges to contain until you you have the resources to attack full on.

In some areas where there are so many cane toads you have to work killing them into your lifestyle. Put off using the car until after it rains or take the car out a bit later in the evening than you normally would so that you can kill toads on the road. If you run over them just right they make a satisfying POP! ..a bit like bursting a blown up paper bag. On trips you can play "explode the toad" with variations to amuse the kids like explode the most toads in 10 minutes, loudest exploading toad, getting three in a row ie ..POP ..POP ..POP, a hatrick!.

The toads preference for roads and the volume of vehicle movement in society means that the car, for so long harmful to the enviroment, is well placed to help make an impact (impact ..get it!) on cane toads. All the driver has to do is conciously run them down. This is a potential source of accidents, true, but with debate as to wether you should kill toads some people actualy swerve to avoid hitting them.

Golfers can contribute to the toad cull because toads like golf courses. They are flat, well mowed, with shallow accessible water traps, in short, toad heaven. But when the toads did arrive on golf courses they started swallowing the moving golf balls and it is very likely the first toads to be hit good and hard with golf club was just a consequence of a traditionalist insisting on playing the ball where it laid so to speak. But after a while it became common knowledge that when you drove a toad. hitting it just on it's sweet spot, the toad split and you you could extract your ball with a tea bag squeezer you keep with the pouch with your tees then rinse the ball, still held in the sqeezer, clean in the nearest water trap.

From there it was a short step to using toads for practice driving swings. It gave a more realistic feel of the club hitting through and also reduced toad numbers and the chance of your ball being swallowed. Community pressure was put on clubs to reduce cane toad numbers and, to provide tangible evidence of their commitment, some clubs used a spare column on the score card for the members to total their toads leading some lexicographers to believe that this was absorbed into ordinary language usage as exampled by Queenslanders saying, for example, that they were going out after dinner to "total a few toads".

An important and traditional part of golf is golfing ettiquite. On the golf course practice your driving using toads by all means...they are cheaper than golf balls and clubs like to feel their members can be counted on to do their bit in the cane toad war but please drive them into the rough. Don't leave their bodies on the fairway. The habit of younger members to try to run over them with golf buggys is not cricket. Using the sharpened end of the handle a golf club that as had it head come off to spear, not one but, several toads and leaving this macarbe living writhing shishkabab stuck in the ground alongside you while your your opponent plays their shot is now considered unacceptable behavior. Toads are to be removed from your "toad sticker" and the sticker returned to your golf bag before your opponent is obliged to play their shot.

Ride-on mulching mowers in the 8.5 HP range give very good results. Wait until the lawn needs mowing then seed it a few of your road-killed toads you have brought home and hung for three or four days until the squashed corpses start decomposing. Spread the corpses toward the end of the day then have a quite beer on your vehrandah and wait until dusk. Soon excited male cane toads will be clambering over one-another trying to copulate with the corpses on the lawn and each other. If you don't have any hung road kill on hand dead rats will do fine and good results can be obtained with soiled sanitary napkins.

It's just like the nature shows on TV but sick. Now grab your gogles and gloves lower youself into the seat of your ride-on and carve (almost literally) a big wide circle in the grass around your property boundary cutting off any escape for the more alert toads on the outside of the ruck around the corpses. Then remorselessly you keep driving around in decreasing circles, until the lawn is mowed. To quote my lawn-mower dealer "With the ToadoLater you'll wonder where the toads all went".

Squashing toads is not for the squeamish, but if your going to be an active conservationist you have to have some toad topping technique which is effective. In the cattle country of North Queensland the tool of choice is the hand held electric cattle prod. This is designed to give an electric shock to 2000 lb semi-wild cattle to encourage them to move down a chute so I can only fantasize about what it does to a 2 lb cane toad and how less strenouous it must be than using a baseball bat.

What I really like is the road trips to the week-end organised culls and the social aspect. There is nothing better after a long day's toad collecting than to stand with fellow conservationists around a roaring campfire, my arm around a university chick whose come up from Bribane for the week-end, sing, drink beer and toss the days collection of toads one by one on the fire and oops! That one was not humanely killed was it? (and they say cane toads can't jump!).

Black humor aside, I support the humane killing of feral animals, you won't get popular support for reducing the feral animal populations without supporting such a policy. But ground nesting birds, small unique marsuipials and our own native frogs, whose native habitats have already been reduced by man, also have a right to survive and not be made extinct by the impact of feral animals introduced into their remaining habitat by man. In the final analysis that's what really matters.

www.reel.com You can buy the video "Cane Toads" by Mark Lewis (1987). This is suberb television viewing that would make the producers of Monty Python (or any wild life documentary) green with envy. While your at it order "Rats" by Mark Lewis (1988) and discover the real reason that New Yorkers double bolt their doors at night.

www.looksmart.com.au At this site you can buy the video "Cane Toads" by Mark Lewis (1987). This is suberb television viewing that would make the producers of Monty Python (or the producers of any wild life documentary) green with envy. While your at it order "Rats" by Mark Lewis (1988).

www.austmus.gov.au/factsheets/canetoad.htm Australian Museum. A cane toad information leaflet. I was referred to it by the CSIRO!
www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/ Their new url. No obvious Cane Toad reference. Using their seach box to search for "cane toad" produces a list of 13 links. A seach shows you can buy a 23cm Cane toad at the Museum Shop ..described as famous! Another issue!

www3.turboweb.net.au/~scrubec/Toads.htm Cane Toad Community Education And Eradiction Project. They make the point that of 6500 toads brought alive for humane disposal(refigeration!) only two were native frogs (returned to collection point). Community event with prizes for the largest toad, ugliest toad ect.

www.collideascope.com "The RoadKill Quarterly". A couple good pics of toads that have been run over (tell the kids that the froggie is sleeping!). *24/12/01 Collideascope is no longer RoadKill. Do last search for Roadkill, collect any pics off net and remove this collideascope link.

www.csiro.au
CSIRO Commonwealth (of Australia) Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
Resesearchers are examining the possibility of introducing a pathogen which is specific to the cane toad and will not effect other native amphibians
I will try to see where they stand with this, maybe they need some support.

www.anca.gov.au/plants/manageme/frogcane.htm ## 400 Can't Resolve 3May03 to 28 June 03 Did not come up (including www.anca.gov.au itself) ##
Cane Toad page of the Biodiversity Group of Enviroment Australia. A Government deparment referred to by the CSIRO.
*4/1/02 Now get the www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity page (no obvious toad references ..an issue here perhaps!)shown in the next site below (no obvious toad references ..an issue here perhaps!):-

www.ea.gov.au Enviroment Australia.
www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity Biodiversity page (to see if any cane toad activity).

Their nav gif interested me. It was a montage of several gifs like this. I must look at the code. Meanwhile this can be described as toad food somewhere.

www.ezone.com/games/canetoad For Cane Toad "Explode" A game for kids to try to prepare the next generation to be more conservation concious than perhaps their parents have been.
In the game the players becomes Lenny Loosejocks and freinds who have been employed by the Queensland Government to drive the length and breadth of Queensland to run over as many toads as they can.
How many toads can you explode? (Requires Macromedia Flash Player -takes a while to come up with 56kb modem)

Cane Toads are prolific breeders and will never be controlled by just stamping on them. Commercial exploitation might contribute to control so contact me and contribute ideas about how to turn toads into dollars.

Tourists and visitors! Help out. If there are cane toads on the road croaking ..croak them for good (but stay situation aware ..we have had one death in the Cane Toad war).

Announcement August 2002. The Federal Government has announced that it will investigate a biological control to reduce the impact of cane toads on native wildlife under a $1 million Federal Government program. Funded through the Natural Heritage Trust's National Feral Animal Control Program, CSIRO scientists will search for a gene that is critical to toad development and that can be 'switched off'.

Another avenue to reduce the impact of cane toads may lie in the toad's extremely good sense of smell. Unlike other frog and toad species, cane toads can detect food from over one kilometre away, which suggest they find food by smell. If the female breeding hormone can be isolated and sprayed on to rocks and other common objects in the bush, males could be lured into amplexus (copulation) with such inappropriate objects and, unable to complete mating, subsequently die through desiccation. Along with a biological control, the ability to identify and isolate hormones may also provide an important and valuable key in the battle to reduce the impact on native wildlife from the inevitable toad invasion.

Energy Resources Australia Ltd, who have a mining lease in Kakadu National Park, are worried that impact on wildlife due to cane toads will be attributed to their operations. The have a webpage on the topic of cane toads which is a good one page summary of the topic. Even they say that programs in place are aimed at either 'predicting the impact of canetoads on wildlife', 'community education' or 'investigating control options'. Here at least is some support for my contention that despite PR hype and announcements carefully worded to create a image of active cane toad control activity on the part of authorities such as in the two paragraphs above, the truth remains that there are no cane toad control programs in place in Australia.

Aussie John's Site Page Last Updated And Links Checked: 28 June 2003

Cane Toads (Bufo Marinus)

The First Lesson

Here Endeth the First Lesson

The Second Lesson