Backstory: Busting cane toads Down Under

Sawyer issues directions like a commander deploying his troops. "We'll sweep through the nature reserve in both directions," he tells them. "You should be able to see them from the reflections of their eyes. Just walk up to them, grab 'em from behind and put them in the bag. Simple."

The volunteers fan out into the darkness, nonchalantly stepping around a poisonous brown tree snake as it slithers through the wet grass.

"I caught three [toads] on my first outing. I find them repulsive," says Marilyn Bartels, an accountant, the beam of her flashlight slicing through the darkness.

Within a few minutes, two toads are found lurking in the undergrowth. They're unceremoniously scooped up and dropped in a sack. A large cane toad – Latin name Bufo marinus – resembles a half-deflated football and can fill the bottom of a bucket, weighing in at a hefty 1.3 pounds.

"I grew up in Brisbane, and we used to see heaps of green tree frogs, but since the cane toads arrived you don't see any," says volunteer Stacey Anderson, an entomologist. "This is people power in action – we can stop them if we want to."

Sawyer emerges from the darkness clutching a dozen writhing toads in each hand. They will be rendered unconscious with carbon-dioxide gas and put in a big freezer. Toad carcasses are processed into liquid fertilizer distributed to nurseries and hardware stores around Darwin, where it sells for almost $10 a bottle. Preliminary results have shown it is especially good for growing bananas and papayas.

In addition to weekly toad musters, locals round up toads in their gardens and dispatch them with what's at hand (often golf clubs and cricket bats). The more squeamish can place their captured toads in FrogWatch's roadside "detention centers" in and around Darwin. These boxes are equipped with food and water to keep the toads alive until they can be humanely destroyed.

Australia's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals advocates a more elaborate approach, advising people to smear hemorrhoid cream on the toads' backs, which makes them unconscious. They are then frozen in a freezer.

While Darwin is already besieged, millions of other toads are converging on Western Australia, hundreds of miles away. Efforts to head them off are difficult: The toads have a rampant libido and a female can lay up to 35,000 eggs at a time. Even the tadpoles are poisonous to native animals.

"They breed in extraordinary numbers," says Lee Scott-Virtue, an archeologist who leads the Kimberley Toadbusters, based in the remote town of Kununurra. "You go to a billabong and the whole bank will be moving with a carpet of toads."

The Toadbusters, she says, have "been at it for 19 months without a break. Over the weekend just gone we reached the 100,000 mark – that's adult toads and tadpoles, caught and killed."

The toad busters of Western Australia and the Northern Territory acknowledge that the best they can do is stem the onslaught while waiting for scientists to come up with a silver bullet capable of drastically reducing numbers.

Despite the enormity of the challenge, volunteers like Ms. Scott-Virtue remain fiercely committed to the cause. A year ago she was married in a toad-muster wedding – a simple ceremony in the bush, a toast to the couple, and then the whole party went off in the night in search of their quarry.

"We have a saying – if everyone in Australia became a toad buster, the toads would eventually be busted," she says.

Sawyer feels no hatred for the invaders. "I have a huge amount of admiration for them as animals," he says, dumping another fistful of toads into a sack. "I just wish they weren't in Australia."

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