You and I were taught at school that the only non-marsupial in Australia before white settlers was the dingo - this is a lie and one that could bring about the extinction of many Australian species.
Today in the news, an Australian biologist Rick Shine was being praised and honoured for his groundbreaking suggestion that we should release small cane toads ahead of the invasion front. Rick Shine is a winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's science awards for his suggestion that while predators who eat large cane toads die, a deterrent effect could be induced by releasing small toads, the theory being if a predator eats one and gets a little sick it will avoid eating large ones in future.
Rick's proposal at best means in the short term a few large predators will survive, but by introducing the toads to areas 'ahead of the front' where they do not already exist, he's proposing increasing the territory the toads control .. He is viewing the threat from toads as one of predator deaths.. but this totally ignores the far greater threat that cane toads compete for food with our native species, and being inedible means natives have little they can do to control the toads numbers - in time this will result in the same as happens elsewhere - the toads will be more effective in competing for food and the natives will simply die out.
Back to the lie - Go to a quiz night and answer that dingoes are Australia's only native placental and you'll be marked correct, but dingos are a relatively recent introduction of dogs indigenous to the Northern islands.. and they're not special, in fact they're just a dog, the same species as a chihuahua or a great dane - they're just a different looking dog. but the little guys that predate the dingo are a lot older.
Before those dogs there were other species of placentals which were here far, far longer and at least one of them does compete effectively against the cane toad. You weren't taught about them, in fact you probably think of them as vermin and maybe have even killed a few without even knowing .. but these have shown up in the Australian fossil record for about 3.5 million years and predate even some of our marsupials. ..
They are of course our native rodents - yup, rats. Not black European rats, not the ship rats - but highly evolved species of rodents that have had millions of years adapting to this continent. But due to the lie about dingoes and a lack of awareness about the dozens of species of native rats, countless numbers of these little guys have been slaughtered without a moments thought and if you look at that list of the dozens of species, you'll see more than a few are extinct - in fact most of Australia's mammalian extinctions are rats.
At one time there have even been bounties on rats - and they were hunted both for their fur and the bounty to the point that they were wiped out of a lot of their normal ranges.
So how do rats and cane toads have to do with each other? well one rat in particular, the Rakali is a carnivorous predator rat which frequented waterways around the country, called river or water rats in the past, the government encouraged their eradication, while others hunted these unprotected little guys for their pelts - but in Queensland and interesting discovery was made.. a lady kept calling up her local council complaining about the mess 'teenagers' were leaving killing toads. No one was fussed about it and the case was ignored for a time before a ranger went and checked and found cane toads torn apart and partially eaten - LOTS of them. Now this made no sense as usually anything eating a toad dies quickly, but there was no evidence of who'd been eating them and no dead animals.
In time it was observed the river rats were killing them, part skinning the toads and eating the non-poisonous parts and leaving the rest. The adult rats were teaching their offspring the same trick, after all rats are really smart little guys. Problem is, after all our years of killing rats it's so ingrained that rats are bad, we kill them wherever we find them and the numbers of surviving river rats is tiny.
If we ran a breeding program or set aside some land and kept out rat-predators, we could build the numbers up and let these guys go to town on the cane toads - they would breed up in numbers to meet the availability of food, and in due course possibly eliminate the toad altogether.. but again, we'd have to retrain us humans that not all rats are bad AND we'd need to protect the rats from their biggest predator aside from humans and that is cats. A fully grown river rat could probably give a cat a run for it's money, but not a juvenile rat. Sanctuaries would need to be set aside for the river rats, probably in cane toad areas first, and they could be trapped and released to the frontline areas where toads are only recently appearing.
It could work, we'd be saving one of our most fascinating and ancient species while eliminating cane toads.. but first people need to actually learn about the Rakali and raise awareness before they're all gone and Australia is over run with cane toads
11:47 p.m. - 2016-10-19
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