The cane toads are coming. Can a simple, but clever plan stop them from fully invading Western Australia and causing catastrophic damage?
The cane toads are coming. Can a simple, but clever plan stop them from fully invading Western Australia and causing catastrophic damage?
Join our host David as he talks with Professor Ben Phillips about the project he's leading, the Toad Containment Zone (TCZ). A collaborative effort between community, rangers and scientists, the TCZ is the last line of defence against the cane toad invasion of Western Australia. If not stopped, the cane toad will have devastating wildlife and cultural impacts.
Professor Ben Phillips is a population biologist and a Premier Science Fellow at Curtin University, where he conducts biosecurity research in the School of Molecular and Life Sciences. He has worked extensively across the Northern Territory and Western Australia on cane toad biology, ecology and evolution, and on how to control and reduce the impacts of cane toads on vulnerable native species, including northern quolls.
Ben’s modelling work has identified where the Toad Containment Zone should be placed and how large it should be to stop the toad invasion to the Pilbara.
You can find Ben on:
This podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au
Host: David Karsten
Producer:Emilia Jolakoska
Episode researcher:Zoe Taylor
Curtin University acknowledges all First Nations of this place we call Australia and the First Nations peoples connected with our global campuses. We are committed to working in partnership with all Custodians and Owners to strengthen and embed First Nations’ voices and perspectives in our decision-making, now and into the future.
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Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of Curtin University.
00:00:00:05 - 00:00:08:21
Sarah Taillier
This is The Future Of where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
00:00:09:22 - 00:00:36:15
David Karsten
Hello, I'm David Karsten. In Australia, the cane toad is an extremely destructive pest. It outcompetes native animals for food and habitat and wreaks havoc on the agriculture industry. It's also poisonous to many would be predators such as quolls, snakes and even crocodiles. This invasive amphibian has spread throughout northern Australia and is now set to descend upon the Pilbara region of WA, if not stopped.
00:00:36:24 - 00:01:02:03
David Karsten
Up to 95% of the Pilbara will be colonised by cane toads, which will directly impact scores of our native species. In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Ben Phillips, a population biologist in Curtin's School of Molecular and Life Sciences. We talk about how the project is leading the toad containment zone is a once in a lifetime opportunity to stop the toxic spread of the cane toad in WA.
00:01:02:16 - 00:01:15:15
David Karsten
If you'd like to find out more about the project, you can visit the links provided in the show notes. Ben, first of all, we need some context. What are these cane toads and how and why were they introduced to Australia?
00:01:15:21 - 00:01:44:08
Ben Phillips
Yeah, well it's a, it's a it's a long story. So there are, there are essentially a large frog that, you know, from the Amazonian rainforest that were brought to islands in the Caribbean in the 1800s. And then again, so several islands in the Caribbean in the 1800s, but then again in the 1920s by the sugar industry in the Caribbean, looking for things that might control control insect pests in sugar cane.
00:01:45:07 - 00:02:09:21
Ben Phillips
And so, you know, that was as far as they'd gone. The Caribbean is not that far from South America. And that was that was where where it sat until I think it was 1932. There was a world a world Congress of sugar growing. People happened to be in Puerto Rico and there was a the toads had been introduced into Puerto Rico a few years earlier.
00:02:09:21 - 00:02:32:16
Ben Phillips
And there was a woman that gave a presentation. And her name was Raquel Dexter, except she gave a presentation saying that since toads had been introduced to Puerto Rico, the sugar yields had gone up in the two years after the cane toads had been brought into Puerto Rico. And from that and a few other little bits and pieces, she was kind of making the argument that toads might be a really good biological control for them, for sugar cane pests.
00:02:33:16 - 00:02:45:06
Ben Phillips
And there was a couple of people there, a couple of people from Australia, there was a guy from Hawaii there and the guy from Hawaii was so impressed with his talk he just grabbed some toads right then and there and took them back to Hawaii.
00:02:45:06 - 00:02:46:02
David Karsten
She brought samples.
00:02:46:07 - 00:03:00:09
Ben Phillips
Yeah, he, he brought live toads back to Hawaii because back in the day you could just do that, right? So he brought a whole bunch of toads back to Hawaii, just released them immediately and then he of a few years he corresponded with the people in Australia and said, oh, it's working great, you know, the toads are doing really well.
00:03:01:03 - 00:03:29:15
Ben Phillips
And so he convinced the people in Australia to come over and grab some of the toads that he'd introduced to Hawaii. And so yeah, so the, the Bureau of Sugar Experimental Research up in north Queensland paid one of their staff members, a guy called Reg Montgomery, to catch a train down to Brisbane, a steamer across to Hawaii, him and him and the, the Hawaiian fella collected a bunch of toads in the hotel yard and they brought them back to Australia and let them go and the rest is history.
00:03:29:22 - 00:03:31:09
David Karsten
Basically we're naming names...Raquel, Reg...
00:03:31:09 - 00:03:48:18
Ben Phillips
Yep, yeah. There's a few others to name... we could go...There's a hero in the story too. So a few years after they released toads or a few months after their release toads, I should say there was a guy by the name of Walter Froggatt.
00:03:48:19 - 00:03:49:06
David Karsten
No!
00:03:49:23 - 00:04:12:02
Ben Phillips
Yep. He was the chief entomologist for Australia at the time. So as someone who things out about insects, but he was very concerned that releasing toads would be a major disaster. And he made that argument and the Federal Government said, you should stop, stop doing this. And they they put a ban on further releases of toads that instantly set the sugar industry into lobbying mode.
00:04:12:11 - 00:04:22:08
Ben Phillips
They lobbied hard to their premier. Their Premier lobbied hard to the Prime Minister of Australia and the ban got lifted about six months later after a direct letter from the Australian Prime Minister's office saying Release the toads.
00:04:23:07 - 00:04:32:06
David Karsten
Let's backtrack a little for more context. For those of us that don't know how important was the Australian sugar industry to our economy in the 1930s?
00:04:32:09 - 00:04:50:21
Ben Phillips
Yeah, well, I'm not sure how important it was to our economy compared to things like sheep and wheat and so forth. But it was certainly a important part of North Queensland's economy and I guess further historical context you really need to take into account that, you know, this idea of biological control, that you could bring one thing to help control.
00:04:50:21 - 00:05:14:01
Ben Phillips
Another thing was really just getting going as an idea. People were really excited about it and we'd had this major success in Australia with prickly pear and a little moth called cactoblastis. So prickly pear had been a major weed. And then some scientist brought this this little moth across and it basically solved the problem. Right? So there was this there was this amazing success story that had just happened.
00:05:14:01 - 00:05:23:19
Ben Phillips
And so biological control was a really hot idea at the time. And so and so perhaps something's got done that probably should have been thought through a little more carefully.
00:05:24:08 - 00:05:46:14
David Karsten
So we're getting some great feedback from Raquel over in Puerto Rico and Sugar Guy in Hawaii. But of course, that is purely from a sugar output and productivity perspective. Was there any conflicting evidence or or supplementary evidence about the effect on local wildlife in those two environments?
00:05:47:00 - 00:06:11:05
Ben Phillips
I think there might have been a few comments along the lines of, Oh, they're doing fine and everything seems okay. And maybe that was true in Puerto Rico or maybe it was true in Hawaii, but it certainly wasn't in Australia. Although that story of impact on wildlife really took some decades to emerge. So toads, you know, the first certainly the first scientific paper or the first magazine article even started to talk about their impacts was in the 1960s.
00:06:11:10 - 00:06:21:04
Ben Phillips
So toads have been in the country for well over 30 years before people were starting to raise, you know, legitimate concerns about the impacts that they were having.
00:06:21:24 - 00:06:38:13
David Karsten
Once, Walter Froggatt's warnings had been adhered to and then subsequently ignored or rebuffed what were those fallouts? Both. Both economically and and also in terms of wildlife. It's been it's been phenomenal the scale of it.
00:06:38:16 - 00:07:00:15
Ben Phillips
Yeah, that's right. So I think I think the first thing is the scale. So what a frog, you know, said that cane toads will become as big may become as big a pest as as rabbits and that there's no limit to their westward spread was was his his line and and that's proved to be very prophetic like they're still spreading westward 90 years later.
00:07:00:15 - 00:07:32:07
Ben Phillips
So they now occupy something like 1.6 million square kilometres of the country, huge area. They've just been spreading ever since they were released. Well beyond, obviously, the sugar cane, the small sugar cane growing districts of Queensland and and cane toads, they're, they're, they're, you know, I said they're like a frog but they're actually a toad. Australia doesn't have any native toads and the toads carry a swathe of defensive toxins and they make that are great for defending toads, but, but none of our Australian frogs have those same toxins.
00:07:32:07 - 00:07:53:09
Ben Phillips
And so essentially what you have is a is an animal that looks like a frog, it smells like a frog, but it's carrying a set of toxins that none of Australia's predators have had any evolutionary exposure to. And so most of it, most of our predators have no resistance to this toxin and are killed very rapidly when they make the mistake of trying to eat a toad.
00:07:53:09 - 00:08:30:09
Ben Phillips
So there's absolutely no doubt the toads have killed millions of Australian animals as they have spread across the country and they've caused massive declines in, you know, charismatic species like like quolls and large goannas that those many populations of those animals have gone extinct when toads have arrived, some of those populations have hung on. So as far as we know, they've not caused any global extinctions, but certainly lots of local extinctions, you know, kind of in the in the realm of 90 to 95% declines in a whole range of native animals.
00:08:30:24 - 00:09:01:17
Ben Phillips
And that's caused that, that goes on to cause big impacts on their genetic diversity as well. So for example, you know, recent a recent paper that Brenton Watkins, who works with me put out, estimating that cane toads are associated with about a 95% decline in genetic diversity in northern quoll population. So they come through, the calls, get hammered, a few populations hold on, but there's just so few individuals that essentially the population that comes back has very little genetic diversity.
00:09:01:17 - 00:09:09:24
Ben Phillips
And so that of course sets all those populations up for future, you know, to not be as resilient to future impacts as they would have been otherwise these.
00:09:09:24 - 00:09:17:23
David Karsten
Toads themselves then are they could you paint a picture for us because they you say they look like frogs but jays that big.
00:09:17:23 - 00:09:32:08
Ben Phillips
Yeah, that's right. So I guess the average toad is about the size of your fist. You know, probably the biggest toad that I've seen in a museum would probably be about the length of your forearm so they can get up to, you know, one, one and a half kilos. You very, very rarely see them that size, much closer to kind of fist size.
00:09:32:08 - 00:09:56:20
Ben Phillips
So they're by Australian standards, they're a very big frog. They brown, they have, you know, a kind of well depending on whether it's a male or female, they have different color on on their backs. But one characteristic is they have these massive glands on their shoulders that are just full of full of, you know, a complex cocktail of chemicals, none of which you would like to eat.
00:09:56:20 - 00:10:12:11
David Karsten
Look, apart from the damage, often fatal, that that can happen when when toads are actually eaten by native wildlife, what do they themselves predate on? And is that part of the destruction that they wield as well?
00:10:12:16 - 00:10:40:03
Ben Phillips
Yeah, it's a good question. And scientists have thought about that at this point. No one's really showing a major impact in terms of production. We know that they reach much higher biomass and other frog species in some areas. So some places you might end up with 90% of the of the amphibian biomass is made up of toads so they can get to huge densities and of course they're eating lots and lots of insects and really anything small enough to to get in their mouth.
00:10:40:03 - 00:11:03:22
Ben Phillips
So they certainly it insects, they've been known to eat baby birds. They have disrupted ground nesting birds like rainbow beetles, for example. They are known to clog up their nests and eat the chicks. But but by and large, this kind of impact from predation has been very difficult to show that it's actually had a major impact on on populations.
00:11:03:22 - 00:11:15:15
David Karsten
Just we're reading through some of the research. Apparently, the production of dung beetles has has has an effect as far as processing cattle faces.
00:11:15:15 - 00:11:37:20
Ben Phillips
Yeah, that's right. So so this is work some colleagues of mine undertook. But you know, around some of these this pastoral infrastructure in the drier parts of northern Australia, you can get very high densities of toads and of course they have to survive on something while they're there. They'll eat all the insects. And of course that's what the points are, also bringing the cattle.
00:11:37:20 - 00:12:02:01
Ben Phillips
So they're also a major point for dung beetles to to do their business, so to speak. And and the toads have a major impact on the numbers of dung beetles in those areas. So and a lot of these dung beetles have been brought in by pastoralists to help control the you know, they'll bury the cattle poo and turn over nutrients and reduce the parasite load in cattle and various other things.
00:12:02:01 - 00:12:10:23
Ben Phillips
So on one hand, we're introducing a species to help to, you know, be of a benefit to agriculture. And on the other hand, we have this invasive species coming along and gobbling them all up.
00:12:11:03 - 00:12:22:04
David Karsten
Oh, look, it's time to get down to brass tacks, Ben, as as the the cane toad has made its way westward. Have there been efforts over time to stop that push?
00:12:22:13 - 00:12:40:08
Ben Phillips
Yeah, well, it has. So probably the biggest effort was was mounted as they came across the Western Australian border. And I guess between about 2006 to 2009 there was a very big effort push by the community, largely based out of Canberra to try and stop the toads getting to Western Australia.
00:12:40:08 - 00:12:46:04
David Karsten
I'm of the vintage that remembers that quite, quite clearly. Then it was that when everyone was encouraged to pop them in the freezer.
00:12:46:04 - 00:13:08:22
Ben Phillips
Yeah, that's right. So there was, there was a couple of community groups that sprung up around that and there was a lot of community effort and community excitement about the idea that we might better stop cane toads getting into Western Australia. It was, it was an idea that I think, I think the community massively underestimated the the challenge that that was before them.
00:13:09:03 - 00:13:30:10
Ben Phillips
Essentially it's a it was like trying to stop the tide with a with a whole bunch of buckets. Right. So people that was that's not a bad analogy. Rather the sheer numbers of animals moving around and the right that they can breed. So each toad, each female toad might have somewhere between, you know, five and 30,000 eggs in a sitting.
00:13:30:10 - 00:13:53:07
Ben Phillips
And on the invasion front, they they move huge distances. They might move, you know, 40 to 50 kilometres in a wet season. So you've got this huge numbers and you've got really fast movement. And on top of that, you've just got this incredibly remote and difficult to access landscape. And so really there was never any chance that all of that effort could have prevented the toads from arriving in Western Australia.
00:13:53:07 - 00:14:14:04
Ben Phillips
And indeed there's no evidence that it made any difference whatsoever. What it did do, however, was brought communities together around this idea and so there's a lot of good community I guess. Yeah, co-benefits that came out of that around community building and friendships and relationships inside the community. But in terms of an exercise to stop toads, it did not work.
00:14:14:18 - 00:14:28:17
David Karsten
You're involved in the Toad Containment Design Project and and I'd love to know all about this because obviously it's not a biological deterrent. It's it's a very different strategy.
00:14:28:17 - 00:14:53:06
Ben Phillips
Yeah. So the idea of a toad containment zone is this is an idea that has, I guess, built out of, you know, decades of research now. So I guess the first inkling I got got out of it was actually at a workshop organized by one of the community groups that were busting toads up in Kununurra. So they organized a big workshop to bring scientists together from all over the country and community groups to think about how the toads could be controlled.
00:14:53:19 - 00:15:12:12
Ben Phillips
And there'd been a group in that different from the group I was working with. They'd been working on cane toads in arid areas, and they'd worked out that you could you could create little fences around artificial water points. And when you did that, the toads would die because they weren't able to get to the water in in these dry areas.
00:15:12:22 - 00:15:31:23
Ben Phillips
And then that zoomed out of the map and they'd looked at where all of the artificial water points were in Australia, and they found this kind of really skinny stretch between Broome and Port Hedland where essentially the Great Sandy Desert hits the coast. And you've and you've got this tiny little skinny stretch of country where people graze cattle and bring water up to graze cattle.
00:15:32:10 - 00:15:51:02
Ben Phillips
And and so there's this guy called Mark Lett Nick. He's an ecologist, quite a creative thinker and an ecologist. And he'd noticed this and he was like, If you're going to stop toads anywhere, that would be the spot. You know, it's like 30 or 40 cows wide. It's 400 kilometers long and they have to move through there if they're going to get down to Port Hedland into the Pilbara.
00:15:52:06 - 00:16:14:07
Ben Phillips
So so his group did a bunch of work around that, around the idea just saying you know is it likely to work. And then my group also did some work around, around the modeling so, so we'd been doing lots of fieldwork on cane toads out of University of Sydney. We'd done lots of radio tracking, so we knew how cane toads moved.
00:16:14:07 - 00:16:36:18
Ben Phillips
We, we knew about have they bred and so forth and we were able to put all of that into a, into a model, all of that, that learning I guess from it, from our work and various other people into a model that describes the way toads breed and move across the landscape. And we, we use that model to, I guess, test the idea that it might be possible to stop toads between Broome and Port Hedland.
00:16:36:18 - 00:17:01:23
Ben Phillips
And the basic idea is that every wet season rains you get cyclones, there's water everywhere, the cane toads move and breed during the wet season and then every dry season they need to come back to the water and if they don't have that water, they die really quickly. Because remember, we're talking about a rainforest frog that's cruising through northern Australia, which is very, very dry in the dry season.
00:17:02:00 - 00:17:03:22
David Karsten
They are really tough customers.
00:17:04:05 - 00:17:26:20
Ben Phillips
Yeah, well, they really tough but they but at that time of year, they need water every 24 to 36 hours. Right. And if they don't get that, they die really quickly. They just they just dry up the perish. And so every dry season, they need to find water. And in this particular stretch of country between Broome and Port Hedland, almost all of the water that's on the ground is water that's been brought up agricultural purposes.
00:17:26:20 - 00:17:44:21
Ben Phillips
So it's all water that's already managed by people. And so what we did with modeling was we just imagined that those water points weren't there. Right, easy. That's a really easy thing to do in a model. And, and we could work out basically how wide we would need to make a break in this landscape of water points to stop toads.
00:17:44:21 - 00:18:05:10
Ben Phillips
So what works basically the same idea as a firebreak, right? You've got this bushfire raging towards you. Best way to stop it is to put some burnt country in front of it where the fire can't be supported and the fire will stop. Right. So it's exactly the same idea is that except we're using that idea to stop the invasion of invasive species, cane toads, in this case.
00:18:05:10 - 00:18:10:23
David Karsten
How does the actual containment zone project take shape? How does it manifest? How does it.
00:18:10:23 - 00:18:27:08
Ben Phillips
Work? Yeah. So on the ground, we obviously can't remove these pastoral water points in the same way that we do in the model. Right? In the model you just delete points and they disappear and they can't support these kind of toads that you simulate. But in the real world, those water points are critical infrastructure for pastoralists making their livelihood right.
00:18:27:18 - 00:18:47:21
Ben Phillips
So instead of removing those water points, our intention is simply to upgrade them and we can. Toads are not very good at climbing, so it's entirely possible to make a water tank and a water trough that cane toads can't access, but the cattle still can ride. So it's a large part of this project is simply upgrading existing infrastructure.
00:18:47:21 - 00:18:56:19
Ben Phillips
So, so it's improvement in the infrastructure on the, on the property and setting up infrastructure that doesn't leak. And if we do that and it's essentially gone as far as the toads are concerned.
00:18:57:07 - 00:19:01:18
David Karsten
Then that would suggest it's a one time only event. Really? Yeah. There's a chance.
00:19:01:18 - 00:19:23:11
Ben Phillips
This is really a once in a lifetime chance to stop to stop the toads So there's been nowhere else in their invasion history across northern Australia where this opportunity has presented itself. And we've been waiting for it now for, you know, 2011 or 2010 it was pointed out to me. So we've been waiting for t.des to get there, knowing that there was nothing we could do to stop them spreading through the Kimberley, which was just a tragedy.
00:19:24:07 - 00:19:26:13
Ben Phillips
But we can do something about them getting to the Pilbara.
00:19:26:23 - 00:19:32:21
David Karsten
How far out from that containment line are they and and when do you expect them to arrive.
00:19:32:21 - 00:19:54:06
Ben Phillips
Yeah. So they came into Western Australia in 2009 and it's now 2024 and they have completely invaded the Kimberley. So many people in Western Australia don't realize that that's happened, but the cane toads have spread across the entirety of the Kimberley now and they got to Derby last year and they're there now as of as of a few weeks ago.
00:19:54:18 - 00:20:17:16
Ben Phillips
They are about 16 kilometers west of the Fitzroy River on the on the main highway to Broome. So they're heading to Broome and they will probably be there in 3 to 4 wet seasons and that's about where we need to be ready. They'll get to the top of this area that we're calling the toad containment zone. I'll get to the top of that area at about the same time.
00:20:17:16 - 00:20:21:24
Ben Phillips
So we've got about four years, 3 to 4 years to to get this done.
00:20:22:11 - 00:20:30:07
David Karsten
Many of you are saying we and you are gathering the troops. Tell us who was actually involved and who have you galvanized to make this project happen?
00:20:30:07 - 00:20:48:07
Ben Phillips
Yeah. So the project has come out of, you know, so as I said, we had a very long time to prepare in lots of ways. So, so being scientists and there's a group of us kind of independently looking at this idea and we've all we've gone out and done lots and lots of critical tests of the idea, you know, so cane toads survive on carpets.
00:20:48:07 - 00:21:14:20
Ben Phillips
Can they survive down burrows? You know, how far do they move? What about these assumptions in the model there? There's there's lots of work that's gone on to, I guess, see if we could break the order. And we haven't managed to break the idea through science and and a lot of those ideas. We needed to go and talk to the local community on the ground to make sure that their data were right in their assumptions about how the world works in this part of the world, right and so forth.
00:21:14:20 - 00:21:42:06
Ben Phillips
So we're started a conversation with with people on the ground. That's that's Indigenous landowners and the pastoralists since about 2015 or so. So we've kind of had this kind of long running discussion with is with these folks on the ground and now we're getting to a point where the to are three or four years away. And those people have been thinking about this idea for a long time and they're all very keen to do what they can to to stop the toads partly because.
00:21:43:02 - 00:22:11:01
Ben Phillips
Well, certainly the Indigenous landowners, it's fundamental to them. They want to look after their country. And so they say this is really important to pastoralists. Of course they also would prefer not to have toads and I think everyone on the ground would like to make this work. Right. You know, the the potential impact of potential what this project potentially delivers, right, is 27 million hectares of Australia that toads don't get into.
00:22:11:01 - 00:22:37:08
Ben Phillips
It keeps them out of the Pilbara, it keeps them out of areas further south. So it's a it's a nationally significant conservation action if we can pull it off and everyone on the ground is quite excited about doing that. And so, so the people on the ground are keen to do it, but of course it requires resources, it requires planning and, and, and certainly because it's involving upgrading and maintaining pastoral infrastructure, it's definitely going require some some money and some resources to make that happen.
00:22:37:13 - 00:22:59:12
Ben Phillips
Pastoralists can't afford to do that on their own. So, you know, that brings in the state government and environmental groups and you know, this emerging environmental market, there's potentially a huge impact on the Pilbara, which will have an impact on, on mining, the mining industry in the Pilbara. So the mining industry is interested in making this happen as well.
00:22:59:12 - 00:23:07:13
Ben Phillips
So there's a large number of people gathering around this project right now to to see if we can pull it off and get it done in time to stop the toads.
00:23:08:03 - 00:23:28:24
David Karsten
And obviously that's that's in part due to the history of cane toads and and their impact on wildlife. But more directly we've now seen what's been happening in the Kimberley and can you tell us exactly how it's manifested in the Kimberley? Are there specific species that have really been affected by the arrival of these toads?
00:23:29:03 - 00:23:54:06
Ben Phillips
Absolutely, yeah. So so we had work, we're working on northern quolls for example. Right. So this is a, you know, reasonably large by Australian standards, carnivore, you know this one of this spotty native cat things. They, we, we had a bunch of surveys in range of sites as cane toads came through and we saw somewhere between 70 and 95% declines within months of the toads arriving.
00:23:54:06 - 00:24:13:14
Ben Phillips
So those populations crashed. Then that happened, that is now happened across all of the Kimberley. We can expect that to translate into, you know, 95% decline in genetic diversity. There are still quolls in the Kimberley and those quolls will adapt to the presence of toads. But we will never get back that 95% of the genetic diversity that's gone.
00:24:14:19 - 00:24:45:24
Ben Phillips
So that's a permanent impact. The same thing has happened for a suite of large goanna species. So things like floodplain monitors, this is one of our largest, largest lizards in the country. Again, a very charismatic species. They decline by, again, 70 to 95% on average. So we have local extinctions of those happening all across the Kimberley. There's, there's a suite of other species that are also impacted to tomorrow to larger or lesser extents.
00:24:46:06 - 00:25:11:08
Ben Phillips
And we're probably going to see another, I guess from that invasion. The Kimberley, the, the, I guess the conservation listing process goes more slowly than the toads, but we're going to see at least three or four new species added to the threatened species list that we know about already. Our northern blue tongues are another one that was a is a species that are very badly impacted by toads.
00:25:11:08 - 00:25:14:16
Ben Phillips
So yeah. Anyway, so there's a swathe of species that are very badly impacted.
00:25:14:19 - 00:25:18:01
David Karsten
Of 70 to 90% of a population of one species.
00:25:18:01 - 00:25:19:20
Ben Phillips
That puts COVID into perspective, doesn't it?
00:25:20:06 - 00:25:26:18
David Karsten
It certainly does. But also that is a real tangible imbalance in the ecosystem as a result, isn't it.
00:25:26:23 - 00:25:48:15
Ben Phillips
Yeah. So I mean the the flow on effects are incredibly complicated and we really don't know all of the flow on effects. But it's safe to say that that the ecosystem is fundamentally changed after the toad come through and, you know, those large goannas when they get taken out, that reduces the amount of predation on some on some smaller species.
00:25:48:15 - 00:25:58:20
Ben Phillips
So some species actually get a benefit from from toads being there. But but fundamentally, it's a very different ecosystem. I guess after the toads of comes very.
00:25:59:08 - 00:26:11:07
David Karsten
Critical question here. Then when the toads arrive at the toad containment zone, will, you know, within one wet season whether or not it's a success. Is it that simple?
00:26:11:07 - 00:26:32:12
Ben Phillips
It probably is, yeah. I mean, I give it two years to see if it's worked because there's parts of the containment zones that they we expect they'll get into. And we probably won't be able to get them at all. So that'll take a little while to to settle out. But yeah, we should know pretty quickly. We'll, we'll know where they got to in the wet season and then we'll be able to see where they are at the end of the dry season as well.
00:26:32:12 - 00:26:36:04
Ben Phillips
So so yeah, we should know very quickly whether it's working.
00:26:36:09 - 00:26:46:14
David Karsten
Professor Ben Phillips, thank you for for being with us in studio today, too, to talk about this. We are all watching on to see if this incredible idea actually works.
00:26:46:19 - 00:26:50:02
Ben Phillips
Thanks, David. Yeah, we're all watching with bated breath.
00:26:50:02 - 00:27:05:06
Sarah Taillier
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