North Australian FISH FINDER TM forums

Good work

great job but flogging a dead horse there

I guess everybody knows how/why we ended up with these things.

As a kid living at Emerald in CQ I never saw any. I'd see these mainly on the Qld E coast around cane areas like B'Berg/Mackay.

I later spent 20 years in B'berg up to 1995 and simply got used to them. Never thought much about them until I moved back to Rocky in 1995 where they had showed up. Not in any numbers but there all the same.

When I started going to the NT, we'd stop overnight at Chinaman Ck dam at Cloncurry where I never saw so many cane toads in my life. Simply thousands and thousands of them. Much higher concentrations than anywhere I saw on the Qld E coast.

At the Roper R they were there as well. Not as many as Cloncurry but fair numbers. No s/cane in western Qld or Roper. Didn't see as many at Daly.

Obviously, they were spreading out in a ring from the Qld E coast and had reached the NT but the densest part of the spread was in western Qld not far from the NT border. I think the real cane toad invasion of the NT is yet to happen.

i do my fair share if eradicating them hate the bastards but with one toad laying a million eggs we have no hope of stopping them .i use detol here and it kills them pretty quick ,a bit cheaper too than a hollow point but not as much fun lol

Thought I knew about the toad introduction until recently, met an old fella from QLD who was from cane farmer pioneering family. I was whinging about the devastating effect the toad has had on the wildlife in the NT. as well as the stupid reason for their introduction to control the cane eating beetle.
He told me the real reason the toad was introduced was to kill the snakes that were thriving in the cane crops, harvesting was done by hand and the work force was being bitten by snakes, mostly tiapans and browns resulting in many deaths and understandably a work force reluctant to do the work.
The outcome is obvious, since the introduction in 1930s the toad is now in the East Kimberly, there are virtually no reptiles left in the top end.
The toad introduction into Australia is classified as the most bio diversity devastating invasive species release on the planet. The Australian government has ceased all funding for research and control of the toad, we have been defeated.

They have even adapted with longer legs as they march across the continent.

good tucker too. every dead one is a help,

bigwoody wrote: ↑Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:22 am Thought I knew about the toad introduction until recently, met an old fella from QLD who was from cane farmer pioneering family. I was whinging about the devastating effect the toad has had on the wildlife in the NT. as well as the stupid reason for their introduction to control the cane eating beetle.
He told me the real reason the toad was introduced was to kill the snakes that were thriving in the cane crops, harvesting was done by hand and the work force was being bitten by snakes, mostly tiapans and browns resulting in many deaths and understandably a work force reluctant to do the work.
The outcome is obvious, since the introduction in 1930s the toad is now in the East Kimberly, there are virtually no reptiles left in the top end.
The toad introduction into Australia is classified as the most bio diversity devastating invasive species release on the planet. The Australian government has ceased all funding for research and control of the toad, we have been defeated.

i refute that. they were to stop the cane beetle, thats a well known fact, in the 1930s there was no reason to lie or conspire, if they wanted them to kill snakes, they would have stated so. there was no conservation of anything back than, and can was burnt before harvest anyway.

and on the east coast where they were first introduced there are still reptiles, shock horror even snakes.
ibis have even worked out they can flip them belly side up and eat the stomach with no risk of poisoning.

Jumpin Joel and Big Woody are both right. The guy Big Woody came across is dreaming.

They were introduced to stop the cane beetle devastating the sugar crops on the east coast.

There are indeed plenty of snakes in the cane fields especially since irrigation was introduced. Irrigation attracted food for snakes (mice etc).

In Bundaberg at night the street lights attract moths and a little insect called a "sidewinder" which moves sideways on window glass etc at night. The moths, beetles and sidewinders live in the canefields that come right up onto the dwellings on the edges of town. At harvest time the fields were individually set alight driving the toads, beetles, moths and sidewinders into town.

The snakes mice and rats simply go underground to escape the short-lived fire. Now greenstick harvesting is used, so no more cane fires and consequently moths, toads etc stay in the fields with less human interaction.

The toads wait on the bitumen under the street lights. There is what seems to be a moving "haze/halo" around each light. They're "sidewinders".

Each light will have 40-50 little "bumps" on the bitumen directly under it as you approach (toads) waiting for the moths and sidewinders to fall.

One thing that you won't find in Bundaberg are butterflies.

At certain time of year, millions of little yellow butterflies head from Childers east towards the coast. They don't stop at Bundy but head on out to sea. I've seen them still flying east 20 n miles out to sea with thousands of dead yellow butterflies scattered over the surface of the water.

All town and irrigation water used to come from underground. Even after the Lake Monduran dam canal sytem was built to provide irrigation water, the Bundy region wasn't allowed to get water from it. It was for the exclusive use of cane farmers.

I've always considered Bundaberg area to be Qld's version of WA's Wittenoom blue asbestos tragedy (on a smaller scale). But you never hear anything about Bundy. The environmentalist only talk about the effect of cane/agricultural production run-off on the Great Barrier Reef.

Not one word about cane production at Bundy polluting the city's water supply aquifers.

Fertiliser, pesticides etc were used on the cane fields and the water AND pesticides/fertiliser etc seeped back down to the aquifers and was used again and again but only by the Bundy Council for potable water. The cane farmers only used Lake Monduran water for which they paid the Qld Govt a nice tidy sum to offset the cost of the scheme.

Bundy people wanted to have access to Monduran water as well but the local cane farmers association objected claiming it was "their" water. Qld Govt happy to go along with the cane farmers.

The unwillingness by the cane farmers to the sharing of water prevented installation of a small-crop cannery (a closed sugar mill with kms and kms of cane rail lines to it from farms who wanted to switch to small crops instead of cane) from getting off the ground in the Japanese sugar crisis of 1975/76.

Cane farmers in Bundy have a lot to answer for in the Bundy area as does the Qld Govt.

The cane seemed to thrive OK but not so Bundaberg inhabitants despite assurances by the water authority.

I was always somewhat distrustful of a system that pollutes its own drinking water, had no butterflies and had an insect (sidewinders) that contributed to asthma.

Crows also have worked out to flip toads over onto their backs.