Invasive Cane toads are heavily impacting Australian ecosystems by fatally poisoning thousands of top-order predators like quolls, goannas, snakes and crocodiles. Researchers at Macquarie University (previously at Sydney University) have discovered a way to reduce that impact by training predators before the main toad invasion front arrives. If a predator eats a small meal containing toad toxin (small toads or toad sausages) that makes it sick but doesn't kill it, it can remember that negative experience and won’t eat any more toads – of any size (like an experience with food poisoning). So, the predator will survive when the big toads arrive. This is called Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA) and we have shown that it works in field trials on quolls, goannas and bluetongue lizards. It is our only hope of buffering the impact of cane toads on native predators.

In conjunction with Macquarie University, a coalition of research, conservation and land management organisations is training native predators not to eat Cane toads on a landscape scale ahead of the toad invasion in Northern Australia.