RE: Sea Turtle Eggs May Have An Unlikely Savior: The Cane Toad
Fascinating post - thanks for posting it.
There has to be a humane way of killing cane toads; I can't believe McLachlan came out with what he said ("Until we find a humane way..."). Obviously, killing anything needlessly is not good. But the cane toad is very successful in Australia with few if any natural predators? A large weight dropped on one will give you a squashed one. Instantaneously. I know nature and I could easily think up a million-and-one worse ways to die. That routinely happens every day, in nature.
And time really is of the essence if male turtles are increasingly in short supply, globally.
The goannas are almost certainly going to be deterred more by olfactory cues than visual ones so maybe one cane toad can be made to go a long way. Also, surely it won't be too difficult / prohibitively expensive to mass produce such a substance in the lab. Of course, they have to work out what it is first and then how to manufacture it economically...
Exciting times are ahead, though, I would have to imagine and hopefully the turtles can be saved. It would be a great loss to see them finally go extinct. And minimising predation by goannas has to be a fantastic start. For now. In protecting the species.
So, do cane toads have the same effect on predator no. 2? Foxes?
Lol I'm kinda with you. While I obviously don't love the idea of killing toads, but in a war against invasives you gotta get your hands dirty! And I agree; I would say an instantaneous death is a humane one (when we feed our reptiles mice, we kill them instantly to be humane). I know they used to freeze the toads en mass, but it has been shown that freezing to death is an unpleasant death as cells burst when freezing (they don't just 'drift off to sleep' as people once believed!).
I'm not sure about the foxes. I'd imagine a similar effect as they have had to overcome the invasion of the toads as well, though I cannot conclusively say for sure!