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Poisonous cane toads set to overrun western Australia wildlife

After a 69-year migration from tropical Queensland in eastern Australia, an infestation of poisonous cane toads is only a short hop away from crossing the eastern borders of Western Australia state.

Dire predictions of an environmental holocaust for native wildlife have been uttered as barriers have been thrown up on outback desert roads and remote beaches and waterways in northeast Australia.

The dinner plate sized leathery toads (bufo marinus), which can weigh up to 3kg, were imported from Hawaii and released in Queensland in 1935 in a bid to tackle sugar cane beetles that were destroying about 12 percent of the crops. Unfortunately, the beetles could fly and the toads couldn't, so the former still munch away at the cane plantations, and the latter set forth, at first slowly but in recent years at an alarming and accelerating rate, to multiply in almost every conceivable habitat they could find.

Australia got an idea of the ecological impact the toads could wreck three years ago, when they swept through the World Heritage listed Kakadu Wilderness area on the eastern side of the top of the Northern Territory, almost wiping out quolls (native marsupial predators), as well as snakes, birds and even some salt water crocodiles.

The fiercely territorial quolls attacked and ate the toads, which are poisonous. The venom, in glands behind each ear, is sufficiently potent to have killed large crocodiles the same way. As to snakes and birds, the toads either stalk them or sit still looking like a lump of dung before jumping on and eating them.

They have also been seen to squirt the venom over their victims from up to a meter away. Although thought to pose little risk to humans, fatalities have been recorded in remote communities where food became contaminated with their eggs.

The fear is that the more expansive water courses in the north of Western Australia state will prove to be the most favorable habitats yet reached by the toads, where they could wipe out the native goannas, a large meaty lizard that is a staple part of the traditional diet of Aboriginal groups that subsist to this day as hunters and gatherers.
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