How a thousand Aussies rallied to stop hundreds of millions of cane toads
A Gold Coast group has claimed its work has removed anywhere up to 229 million cane toads from getting into the environment.
This monster cane toad was caught in the Cape Conway National Park (Photo: Department of Environment and Science)
The group, Watergum, said that earlier this year, community members from throughout Australia united for a common cause in what was dubbed “the great cane toad bust”
“Over the course of one action-packed week, 1101 dedicated individuals joined forces successfully collecting 19,665 cane toads,” the organisation said.
“This remarkable endevour has resulted in preventing an estimated 52,440,000 and 229,425,000 future cane toad offspring from entering our delicate ecosystem.”
The current population of cane toads is estimated at 200 million and each female can produce 20,000 eggs in a year and have spread to northern NSW and the Northern Territory.
The group has another blitz scheduled for the start of 2024.
The group also has a licence from the University of Queensland to sell a cane toad tadpole trap which lures the tadpoles into a device for collection.
The trap is available in more than a dozen stores in NSW and Queensland.
