"Basically what has happened by introducing the toads is it has created really strong evolutionary pressure both on the toads themselves and on animals that interact on the toads," Shine said.
For example, Shine and his colleague Benjamin Phillips previously showed that two native Australian snake species have evolved smaller heads and are no longer able to eat the toads, which carry a lethal toxin.
Other studies have shown that some would-be toad predators have altered their diets to exclude toads, while others have evolved resistance to the cane toad toxin, Shine said.
"These studies tell us a lot about the evolutionary process," said Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
"Invading species are a huge problem, and cane toads are a classic example of that," he added. "But they also represent an inadvertent evolutionary experiment, the sort of experiment you couldn't [normally] conduct."
Rules and regulations prohibit scientists from purposely confronting native species in the wild with a non-native competitor or predator to see how natural selection works, he explained.
The evolutionary processes spawned by the cane toad invasion have occurred in a span of just 70 years. This adds to evidence from the past two decades that populations can adapt quickly when selection pressure is strong.
"We're taught evolution occurs over these very, very long time frames. But in systems like these, it's incredibly fast," Shine, the study co-author, said.
According to Losos, the unusual aspect of the toad leg length adaptation is the mechanism that drives it.
In most instances rapid evolution occurs when an organism enters a new environment and some variation that was previously irrelevant becomes favored. That variation is repeatedly selected until it becomes more common, he explained.
In the case of the cane toads, longer legs make the toads faster, and the fastest toads are always at the invasion front. The lead toads mate, passing their long legs to their offspring.
As long as there is no disadvantage to being the first into a new territory, this process should allow the toads to "evolve faster and faster rates of movement," Shine said.
Cane Toad Management
According to Shine, as scientists learn more about cane toad biology, they can devise strategies for eradicating local populations, such as changing the character of a breeding pond or staking out toad migration routes.
But the toads are likely to be permanent fixtures in Australia and will continue their spread, he said.
While Shine is optimistic that ecosystems will adapt, "there may be some parts of native systems that don't and, in time, will go extinct," he said.
"One message from the work," he added, "is to try to stop invasive species, you probably ought to start as soon as you get a chance. The longer you let it linger, the more formidable the adversary will be."
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