It would appear the inevitable has happened.

Quarantine officers found a male cane toad at the checkpoint between the Northern Territory and Western Australia border on Friday night.

The officers reported hearing the calling of the toads at the border late last week and say there is evidence to suggest the pest has established a breeding ground in the East Kimberley at Lake Argyle.

ABC news

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because cane toads kill anything which eats it. Eggs and tadpoles kill the little things (i.e. frogs and geckos), toadlets kill the medium sized things (i.e. lizards) and adults kill big things (i.e. crocodiles). So they wipe out the native entire carnivorous population. And we don’t want a country full of herbivores!

What is being done to prevent this? I think the general attitude is best summed up by the term “meh”.

There are a few community based toad squashing groups (who catch and kill individual toads). I suppose they have the required enthusiasm (hell, they’re living in it, while I’m sitting in front of a desk in Perth), but I don’t think they will affect the situation at all. Official government responses to these groups seems to be a gentle pat-on-the-head.

Ok, How do we stop them? Look at the past. Introduced rabbits were a massive problem for Australia in the early 20th century. Hunting individual rabbits is almost laughable. The big ass fence cost a lot of money but didn’t work. Biological methods appear to have cut rabbit numbers dramatically since mid 20th century. Research and introduction of Myxomatosis and Calicivirus dropped numbers from 600 million to 100 million.

But that was after Rabbits did a lot of damage and money wasted on failed methods.

Why isn’t this proven path being taken to slow the toads? Well, this is where the “meh” factor comes into it. The West Australian government has provided a token $500k grant to begin research as well as funding a report into the “effectiveness of current strategies”. Federally, CSIRO have been researching solutions since 1991, but don’t seem to be getting anywhere in a hurry.

So, for now the only solution seems to be either raise cane toad research to a much higher level of importance (i.e. more money), or just give up an let them take over everything.