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Backstory: Busting cane toads Down Under
Australian conservationist Graeme Sawyer is a top general in the defense against a literal amphibious assault.
By Nick Squires | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 16, 2007 edition
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DARWIN, AUSTRALIA - Graeme Sawyer hardly looks like the manager of a multi-media company as he sloshes through a flooded mangrove forest in khaki shirt and shorts on a recent dark evening. The outfit may be vintage Crocodile Hunter, but unlike the late Steve Irwin, Mr. Sawyer has murderous intentions toward the animals he's stalking.
Sawyer is a top general in the defense against a literal amphibious assault – the invasion of the cane toad. The poisonous, warty enemy is legion; the defenders are desperate, resorting to traps, sniffer dogs, and sometimes taking up cricket bats and even hemorrhoid cream to do in the enemy. On this particular evening the strategy is to take as many toads prisoner – for later disposal – as possible.
"We won't be able to wipe them out, but by killing as many as we can, we can minimize their impact," he says, wiping away the sweat and warm rain streaking down his face on this oppressively humid night. "If you just let them breed up, then there'll be absolute devastation."
Sawyer is a founder of FrogWatch, the conservation group that has led the fight in northern Australia against the toxic invaders introduced in Queensland in 1935 to eat a beetle that was damaging the state's sugar-cane plantations.
The experiment was a disastrous failure – the cane toads (native to South America) ignored the beetles but began chomping their way through plenty of other wildlife, from frogs and tadpoles to small lizards. Worse, the poison glands on their backs made them deadly to the crocodiles, mammals, snakes, and birds that tried to eat them.
The toads adapted superbly to the heat and humidity of tropical Queensland, and within decades began pushing south into New South Wales and west into the vastness of the Northern Territory. A couple of years ago they overran Kakadu National Park – made world famous by the Crocodile Dundee movies – and now they're on the doorstep of Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory.
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