When times are really bad, Simon Middap says the golfers on the Pacific Harbour estate in Queensland find it hard to find a spot to place their golf ball.
“There are just so many toadlets,” says Middap, a semi-retired IT engineer and enthusiastic member of the golf estate’s volunteer “toadbusters” team.
“We have a catch-cry. It’s TTTT,” says Middap. “Terrorise toads every third Thursday.”
The toads in question are Bufo marinus – Australia’s invasive cane toad that is a prolific consumer of most things it can fit in its mouths while being poisonous to most of Australia’s native animals.
As a defence, toads excrete a milky bufotoxin from glands on their shoulders – a toxin Australia’s animals have not evolved to deal with. It can even kill the country’s feared freshwater crocodiles.
“In the last month this place has just exploded,” says Middap, who lives on the golf estate on Bribie Island, just north of Brisbane. “There are tadpole swarms in every lake.
“If you have a successful swarm that’s unattended you can have 20,000 toadlets within a couple of weeks. This year is the worst I can remember. Golf courses are classic breeding grounds – toads love it.”
For the third year running, Australians living across the cane toad’s territory are being asked to be a part of the Great Cane Toad Bust run by the not-for-profit community environment group Watergum. Gloves, bucket and a torch are the basic kit.
At last year’s Great Cane Toad Bust, Middap and his mates took out the unofficial top ranking, grabbing more than 2,700 toads from the estate’s golf course and back yards.
This year’s event – to be held from 13 to 21 January – follows months of weather that has been great for cane toads.
Dr Jodi Rowley, a frog biologist at the Australian Museum and the University of New South Wales, says the warm and wet conditions as well as flooding in recent months are perfect conditions for all amphibians – including cane toads.
Floods help the toads reach new territory and Rowley has seen social media videos of swarms of thousands.
“I think it has been a good season for them,” she said. “We can all make a difference at a local level and these toad busts can have a positive short-term benefit to local wildlife.”
The cane toad’s invasion into Australia was deliberate. Queensland’s sugar cane growers thought they would control two beetle species eating the roots of their crop and imported 102 toads from Hawaii in 1935. They bred them and within two months they had almost 3,000 that were released in Gordonvale near the tourist town of Cairns.
How successful they were at dealing with the beetles isn’t clear, as agricultural chemicals were introduced soon after.
But the toads turned out to be very successful at eating and breeding.
Since their introduction, they have travelled about 2,500km (1,555 miles) west across the Northern Territory as far as Broome in northern Western Australia, and about 1,600km south crossing the border into New South Wales.
Cane toads are easy to distinguish from native frogs and toads. One female can lay up to 35,000 eggs and their spawn looks like two rows of black pearls in strings.
Tadpoles are a distinctive black with a clear frill on their tales and tend to swarm together in their thousands. Adult toads have a distinctive ridge over their eyes, leathery bumpy skin and a large gland behind their ear drum. Their front feet are not webbed.
Nikki Tomsett, an invasive species officer at Watergum, says this year they are asking people to collect toads by night, but tadpoles (using a special tub containing a lure) and toadlets by day.
To kill the toads humanely, Watergum and the RSPCA recommend a painless “stepped hypothermia” method. That means putting toads in a container with breathing holes and into a fridge for about 24 hours and then transferring them to a freezer for at least another 24 hours.
For those who don’t fancy having bags of toads in their fridge, there is a network of drop-off points as part of the Great Cane Toad Bust.
“Apathy is a big issue,” says Tomsett. “I think people are used to seeing them and maybe don’t see the point of collecting them when there are so many, but this is a bit like Clean Up Australia Day, but for cane toads.
“People do come back to us [after toadbusting] and say they’ve seen populations drop and native wildlife come back to their properties, and they feel safer letting their animals out at night.”
Aside from cane toads being prodigious consumers of native bugs and even small birds and mammals, their toxin can be deadly to many native animals looking for a feed – from freshwater (but not estuarine) crocodiles to quolls, goannas and many birds. And pets.
As cane toads advance around the country, the “frontline” tends to be populated by larger toads that can kill animals that try to feed on them.
“As that frontline moves to new areas it leaves a wake of devastation,” says Tomsett.
Some species have worked out ways around the toad’s toxin – crows have learned to flip them on their backs to feed from the belly; ibis have been seen provoking toads to release their toxin and then washing them before eating them. Water rats surgically take out the toads’ hearts.
Rowley says the tadpole traps are a positive step in the fight against the toads as they can prevent thousands of toads from developing with only a little effort. “We can’t give up. I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of them.”
Rowley is a co-founder of Frog ID – an app-based citizen science project that lets users record frog and toad sounds and upload them for experts to identify.
Data from the app is helping track the advancement of cane toads, and current data shows the frontline of the cane toad march down the eastern seaboard is just south of Yamba in northern New South Wales – but there have been sightings further south, within an hour of Sydney.
On the Pacific Harbour golf course, Middap is gearing up for another toad-busting session. He’s especially worried about the dazzling and beautiful native rainbow bee-eater birds that ground nest around the course’s bunkers.
“The toads will eat their eggs and their offspring,” he says. “So a dead toad is a good toad.”
