Teacher toads: Buffering apex predators from toxic invaders in a remote tropical landscape

Even after research identifies new approaches for wildlife management, translating those methods for delivery can be logistically challenging. In tropical Australia, invasive cane toads (Rhinella marina) fatally poison many anuran‐eating native predators. Small‐scale trials show that vulnerable predators exposed to small (nonlethal) toads can learn to delete toads from their diets, increasing survival of those predators after toads invade. We deployed this method in the remote Kimberley region of tropical Australia, with >200,000 eggs, tadpoles, or metamorph toads released in advance of the expanding toad invasion front. Remote camera surveys before and after “teacher toad” deployment showed that large monitor lizards (Varanus panoptes) were almost extirpated from control plots but remained abundant in treatment plots, indicating broad‐scale success of this novel intervention.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Conservation Letters

• Publication date

  2024-04-08

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/conl.13012
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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