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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: January/February 2007

Cane toads are champion skeeter eaters

 

SYDNEY--The 1935 introduction of African cane toads to Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji was not quite the ecological disaster that cane toad foes claim, Sydney University biologists Rick Shine and Mattias Hagman have discovered.

While cane toads did not control the sugar cane-eating insects that they were supposed to devour, and have voraciously consumed some small Australian wildlife, especially goanna lizards, Shine and Hagman discovered through a series of controlled experiments that cane toad tadpoles are exceptionally capable predators of mosquito larvae.

"This is very different from the ecosystem catastrophe stories we hear about cane toads," Shine told the Townsville Bulletin. "We found that the presence of toad tadpoles significantly reduced the size of adult mosquitoes at emergence and reduced the survival rates of the larvae of one mosquito species. Mosquitoes did not want to lay eggs in water where there were cane toads."

Concluded Shine, "To truly understand the impact of invasive species, we need to look as broadly as possible, and incorporate studies on a diversity of variables."