Stopping cane toads from advancing across northern Australia
Cane toads have been steadily advancing across the Australian tropics since their deliberate but misguided introduction to Queensland in the 1930s. Now a new project in northern WA known as the ‘Toad Containment Zone’ (TCZ) promises to stop them in their tracks.
The TCZ is based on decades of research including cane toad migration modelling. The project aims to stop cane toads spreading between the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of north-west WA by removing their access to artificial water sources in a narrow coastal corridor.
Past failures
The wet-dry tropics have provided ideal conditions for these toxic pests to proliferate and spread, and previous attempts to stop the advance of cane toads across northern Australia have been unsuccessful.
But cane toads have now come to a bottleneck where the Great Sandy Desert meets the ocean between Broome and Port Headland, and swift action using the TCZ might be able to halt their progress.
“Toads will move into this landscape every single wet season, but if they don’t have access to surface water in the late dry season, when it’s really hot and dry, they perish very rapidly”, explained one of the TCZ project’s scientific advisors, Professor Ben Phillips from WA’s Curtin University.
To ensure the toads “perish” the project will be removing access to water at more than 150 sites by fixing agricultural water leaks.
“What we’re proposing is essentially a plumbing project,” Ben said. “We’re working with pastoralists and horticulturalists to upgrade their infrastructure such that water isn’t accessible to toads in the late dry season. If we do that, the science says the toad invasion should stop.”
Novel collaborative project
The TCZ is unlike any project that’s been attempted in the past, and Ben is optimistic about its chance of success.
“Previous efforts have attempted to find and kill every toad in the landscape [and] that is a difficult proposition,” Ben explained. “This [new] strategy is basically letting the landscape kill the toads, and it does that very effectively.”
The TCZ is a collaborative effort between Curtin University, Deakin University, Rangelands NRM, Nyangumarta Warrarn Aboriginal Corporation and Karajarri Traditional Lands Association.
Since it began, the TCZ project has been guided and informed by Traditional Owners, and Ben believes the development of new partnerships is one of the project’s greatest strengths.
The crest-tailed mulgara (Dasycercus cristicauda) (left), Perentie (Varanus giganteus) (top, right), northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) (centre, right) and yellow-spotted monitor (Varanus panoptes) (below, right) are just some of the native animals at risk of decline if cane toads cross into northern Australia. Image credit: Judy Dunlop
“We’ve been talking with Nyangumarta and Karajarri about this project for seven or eight years now. They are absolutely driving it forward at this point,” Ben said.
“One of the exciting things about this project is that it’s growing a partnership between the Indigenous landowners and the pastoral landholders. Those two groups will be able to work together, not only to affect local cane toad control that protects Nyangumarta and Karajarri Country, but also to deliver a nationally significant conservation action.”
The TCZ will prevent cane toads from harming fragile ecosystems and threatened species across 27 million hectares of Pilbara habitat.
“The potential win here is absolutely huge, and there are no other similar opportunities of this magnitude,” Ben said.
