Drying out the cane toad invasion

By Ed Yong | February 22, 2011 7:00 pm




By blocking the toads from these hubs, we could prevent them from spreading over 857,000 square kilometres, an area of land the size of Pakistan. As Florance says, it’s not a “silver bullet for toad control”, but it can certainly help to cut the numbers of these troublesome trespassers.

Cane toads are less dependent on water than many other frogs, but they’re not adapted to truly dry climates. While some frogs burrow underground or create protective cocoons, cane toads simply lose water until they die of dehydration. In the heat of Australia’s dry season, they need bodies of water to survive. Fortunately for them, humans have provided them with moisture galore, in the form of cattle troughs, boreholes, and dams.

Florance fenced off these artificial water sources in the Northern Territory during the dry season, when temperatures can regularly climb as high as 37 degrees Celsius. He used wire and metal posts to prevent the toads from jumping over, and buried cloth to prevent them from digging under. Once the barriers were set up, Florance evicted all the toads within them, more than 2,000 in total.

The fences worked. In the following months, Florance couldn’t find any toads within the protected areas (although he found several that died at the fences, trying to get in). He fitted radio-trackers to 60 individuals and followed them in their quest for water. Near the fenced areas, all of these toads died within three days. Most of them kicked the bucket after just twelve hours, and they had lost around half of their body weight by that point. Meanwhile, almost all of those released near unfenced water survived.

Without any countermeasures, Florance predicts that the toads will eventually colonise the top half of Australia, spreading over 2.2 million square kilometres. Using a simulation, he calculated that he could reduce that area by 38 per cent if he kept the toads away from man-made water sources. Conservationists could even achieve that by focusing their efforts at 40 to 50 critical “corridor” sites, during the country’s dry season.

The fences don’t seem to harm any other native animals. Small native frogs have adapted to Australia’s harsh climate and they have ways of dealing with the heat without human help. Some died near the fences, but only very few. Meanwhile, larger animals like birds, pythons or mammals are more than able to hop over the relatively short fences. And Florance thinks he could make the fences even more friendly to locals by installing “gates”, made of mesh that’s large enough to let small frogs through, but small enough to keep out the bulky cane toads.

The same ideas could help to halt the spread of other invasive species. These incursions don’t usually happen in a gradually spreading wave – they stem from specific staging grounds. For example, the Argentine ant, another superb invader, spreads by travelling long distances to new areas and setting up colonies that then seed the surrounding lands.

But Florance’s strategy is not foolproof. In some areas, natural waterholes will always allow toads to stage fresh invasions. Blocking artificial sources could keep the toads from spreading to certain strategic areas, but it’s not going to turn back the invasion in any way. If this seems like a shallow victory, remember that against cane toads, victory of any form would be welcome. Since their invasion began, conservationists have tried all sorts of tricks to control them. And as fond as Australians are of “cane toad golf” and “cane toad cricket”, no measures have actually worked on a large scale.

Scientists have tried to find viruses, bacteria or parasites that could hit the toads with debilitating diseases, but to no avail.  Others have tried to simply catch the animals or to use pheromones to lure them into traps, but none of these methods are feasible on a large scale. Some have considered releasing sterile males that would prevent other males from fostering the next generation, but that approach would only work if we release far more sterile toads than the entire existing population! Even bouts of arthritis can’t stop them.

In the light of these failures, conservationists are getting desperate. Some are playing at damage control, trying to train native predators to avoid the taste of toads. And you know things are dire when people optimistically greet the discovery that meat-eating ants are devouring the toads. Florance’s study isn’t going to magically solve the problem, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Reference: Florance, Webb, Dempster, Kearney, Worthing & Letnic. 2011. Excluding access to invasion hubs can contain the spread of an invasive vertebrate. Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.0032

Image by Sam Fraser-Smith

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Comments (10)

  1. zackoz

    Good luck to them, but I can’t help feeling some hopelessness at these efforts.

    Australia is paradise for invasive species – apart from cane toads (as noted), we now have feral goats, cats, dogs, camels, buffaloes, foxes, Indian mynas, Asian bees, European wasps and many more, not to mention invasive European humans.

  2. Vaish

    There’s a reason why I hate toads. They just populate and pollute like they have no better job to do.

  3. Pythons hop over fences?

  4. Ant

    Florance sounds like an awesome Environmentalist,Go Florance!

  5. Marlene Zuk

    As luck would have it, I was *just* writing about cane toads. If people just can’t get enough about them (and indeed who could?), check out Rick Shine’s lab website about them: http://www.canetoadsinoz.com/. Rick is at the U of Sydney and is kind of a cane toad guru; his wife, Terri Shine, created the website. There are a bunch of cane toad myths debunked there, like the idea that they never controlled the beetles they were brought in to destroy. Apparently no one really knows if the toads helped or not, though at least some of the beetles are still around.

  6. What a neat project, even if the invasive buggers are kind of adorable.

  7. I’m sorry to say this, but I think it’s deplorable. With no say of their own, the toads were intentionally introduced by humans to this area. Now they’re being cruelly killed because they’re the scapegoat for what is ultimately our fault.

    “humans have provided them with moisture galore, in the form of cattle troughs, boreholes, and dams.”…..which causes deforestation (cattle farms) and disruption of riparian species (dams).

    This is like the roundup and killing of feral cats in Florida. Cats (both feral AND domestic, indiscrminately) are being trapped killed, but no laws are being made to keep cats indoors. So the cycle starts all over again. In fact, opening an ecological niche like that can make the problem worse.

    What laws were made to prevent this from happening again? Are they spending more money on that than on killing the frogs? And what other ecological consequences will the fence bring? Anyone can see there will be other problems with this.

    Most species decimation is caused by habitat loss. Our fault. If frogs are troublesome tresspassers, what are we?

  8. Matt B.

    Wow, I’ve never heard of a frog cocoon before.

  9. Simon S.

    Cane toads have caused terrible population declines in goannas, snakes, crocodiles and some small mammals in all areas they have moved into. So this looks like a really neat and practical solution to the problem. Good luck to them!

  10. kadyn


    Not all toads do this but some are like your description. But then again how any humans say this, all they do do exactly the same thing as you said bu some live a little better.


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