"He discovered that the eggs secrete bufadienolides – the same substances that make the milky poisons of the adult toads so deadly to Australia’s fauna. Ironically, the same chemicals that protect the eggs later in life also attract cannibalistic tadpoles. And that makes them excellent bait. Crossland’s team, led by uber-toad-wrangler Rick Shine, collected these chemicals from the poison glands of adult toads (you just grab one and squeeze its shoulder) and used them to bait simple traps – plastic boxes with funnels leading into them. They placed the traps in two lakes near the Adelaide River, and waited. As Crossland writes, the traps “rapidly caught tens of thousands of toad tadpoles, and very little else”. After two days, the number of tadpoles in the traps hit a plateau, which suggests that almost all the cane toads in the lakes had been snared. Indeed, the team couldn’t find any for weeks after the traps were laid. Best of all, there’s very little collateral damage for other species. A normal funnel trap would snare lots of native tadpoles and fish, but bufadienolides repel everything except cane toads. Between them, the traps caught over 42,000 cane toad tadpoles, but only 27 fish and 24 insects. Most attempts to control the toads have focused on killing the adults, and with good reason. The tadpoles compete so fiercely that removing a subset of individuals will only give the survivors an advantage, and possibly make them fitter. But Crossland’s team are optimistic that this won’t be a problem for their new strategy, which leaves very few, if any, survivors." - John (bird whisperer) from Bookmarklet

Huh. I really, really hope that works as intended. That would be such a huge breakthrough. - Jennifer Dittrich