Toadbusters wage war on warty foe
Date: 26-Mar-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Belinda Goldsmith
The pair spend hours straining long strings of cane toad eggs from the brackish pool, discarding them onto the hot sand to help stop the spread of the highly toxic toad which was shipped to Australia 67 years ago in an environmental botch-up.
Battling the cane toad has become an obsession for the Utbers - and for hundreds of Australians waging personal wars against the amphibian.
From just more than a hundred imported in 1935, the cane toad has developed into a pest spreading across large areas of Australia, killing thousands of native frogs, snakes, iguanas and birds every year, as well as domestic pets.
"I can lift out 1,000 cane toads in about 45 minutes with a tea strainer," Janet Utber told Reuters after a day toadbusting in the Noosa National Park, an hour north of Brisbane.
"Some people tell me I'm wasting my time. It will make no difference. But I can tell you, no cane toads will grow out of this lagoon this year."
The cane toad, one of Australia's most foul pests, unleashes unbridled hatred from many placid Australians, particularly Queenslanders whose state is now plagued by the warty-skinned creatures which can grow to the size of a dinner plate.
Its survival secret has been two sacks of toxic poison behind its head that can kill an animal as big as a dog within minutes if it mistakes the yellowish brown toad for a tasty meal.
SQUASHED TOAD ART
The lack of sympathy for cane toads has made them easy marks for some residents who use them as golf balls, fire bombs, or targets for four-wheel vehicles.
Even animal groups are hard pressed to defend the creature. People are advised to catch the toads in plastic bags and pop them in the freezer where they die a painless death.
Industries have been spawned by toad hatred.
Some tourist shops in Queensland sell stuffed cane toads, dressed in drag or as football players, while Queensland artist Gavin Ryan scrapes toads flattened by cars off the tarmac and glues them to canvas and plasters paint on "toadscapes".
In hindsight it's extraordinary that the cane toad was invited to Australia.
A shipment of 102 of the South American toads arrived in northern Australia from Hawaii in 1935 to save the sugar industry from greyback cane beetles which were destroying cane fields.
But the masterminds of the plan overlooked the fact that cane beetles can fly and grubs stay at the top of cane stalks while cane toads jump only about 30 centimetres (12 inches).
The project failed abysmally and no one thought to recapture the toads because so few were released.
UNSATIABLE SEXUAL APPETITE
In the meantime, the toad or "Bufo marinus" was proving to be a phenomenal breeder.
The female cane toad can lay as many as 35,000 eggs a year, clearly outpacing native Australian frogs which lay 4,000 eggs, and is matched by the male cane toad renowned for an insatiable sexual appetite.
"The male is constantly willing and ready to clasp onto anything that vaguely resembles a female cane toad, be it a rock or someone's boot," zoologist Ross Alford from the James Cook University in Cairns in far north Queensland told Reuters.
"If they do get hold of a female they will clasp on forever. They're known to cling onto dead females squashed on roads. They're certainly not the smartest of animals."
But cane toads are bright enough to be well aware of two key needs - sex and hunger.
Cane toads are known to eat virtually everything, coming back at the same time each night to houses which put out dog food, and can grow 25 cms tall and to two kilograms (4.4 lbs) in weight.
Scientists have said for years that without a concerted, national effort to stop the toad, its march across the country would continue with individual campaigners failing to make even a dent in the toad population.
A few projects did try, unsuccessfully, to halt its spread in the 1990s, such as a virus imported from Venezuela, but this was also found to kill native frogs.
But fundi