Cane toads, an invasive and poisonous pest, have been wreaking havoc in Western Australia (WA) for the past 15 years. In a desperate effort to slow their spread, the WA government, researchers, Traditional Owners, and pastoralists have teamed up to create the Toad Containment Zone. This innovative landscape barrier aims to halt the toads’ advance into the Pilbara region by targeting their access to water. Can this plumbing-based solution stop the cane toad invasion and protect WA’s delicate ecosystem?
Cane Toads: The Incessant Invader
Cane toads were brought into Australia in 1935 and have been spreading across the land ever since. Over the past 15 years they have completely taken over the Kimberley region in Western Australia and are now encroaching into the Pilbara. How do these frogs and salamanders manage to be such successful colonists?
Cane toads can travel a very long way, cane toad populations were also found to have been dispersing at an unprecedented speed across the decades, according to population biologist Professor Ben Phillips from Curtin University. When they first arrived, these worms only spread around 10 kilometers per year but now they creep across the landscape at up to 43 kilometers per year—over four times as fast as their initial rate. On top of that, one female cane toad can lay 30,000 eggs in one go – talk about an absolute breeding machine. The rapid spread across the country and prolific reproduction has made cane toads a significant threat to native fauna throughout much of the continent.
Solving the Toad Problem By Turning Your Backyard Into A Toilet
In an effort to halt the cane toad advance, the WA government has teamed up with researchers and Traditional Owners — in turn backed by pastoralists — to establish a Toad Containment Zone. The 150-kilometre barrier will be built on the coast just south of Broome and eastward through desert all the way to the Great Sandy Desert, a region where cane toads would not be able to survive because there is no water.
The strategy revolves around targeting the cane toads ability to get water. Professor Phillips says that most of the permanent water in the Pilbara corridor is agricultural water, and at the moment it can be got to by cane toads through leaks and fences ‘which are non-existent, or very porous.’ This will remove the essential resource out of reach for pods of toads across 150 upgrades sites within the Toad Containment Zone. This straightforward ‘plumbing’ tactic is predicted to be extremely effective at curtailing the advance of cane toad front, much like a firebreak can halt the passage of inferno.
A Unique Opportunity to Conserve WA’s Environment
It has been designed following over a decade of scientific research and is considered one of the 2019 Federal Senate Inquiry’s key recommendations to control cane toad spread. Professor Phillips is hoping this landscape barrier will halt the cane toad march, saying ‘this is a real once-in-a-lifetime event.’
Modeling suggests that the cost might be high with respect to both native species and cane toad number if immediate action is not taken, with estimates of 10-24 native species directly impacted and up 90-95% of the Pilbara region threatened by cane-toads. As Bureau of Biological Survey scientist Ted Schmidt once told Discover magazine in 1990, cane toads are ‘a marvelous creature–the Mona Lisa of the herptile world,’ but they were having severe impact on Western Australia’s ecologies. The Toad Containment Zone is an important and new innovation in a battle to preserve the state’s natural heritage from this persistent, toxic invader.
