Young toads are teaching Australian lizards to avoid deadly snacks

Releasing 200,000 eggs and young of a toxic invasive species might seem to be a sure way to make a bad situation worse. But by doing just that in Western Australia, conservation biologists have begun to rescue the region’s largest lizard. Yellow spotted monitor lizards usually die after eating a single adult cane toad, an introduced pest with toxic skin secretions that has wreaked havoc on Australia’s native wildlife. But if these lizards first taste the species’ young, which are only slightly toxic, the predators learn to avoid eating the lethal adults. As a result, they survive even after a wave of adult toads arrives , researchers reported last week in Conservation Letters . “These folks have really been thinking outside the box,” says David Skelly, an ecologist at Yale University who was not involved with the work. “The results are pretty strong.” Other scientists say the tactic could help additional threatened vertebrates, too. First introduced in the 1930s in Queensland to control sugarcane pests, cane toads ( Rhinella marina ) are now spreading west in northern Australia at a rate of 50 kilometers per year, killing almost all monitors they’ve encountered along the way, as well as other reptiles, and even catlike marsupials called quolls . They eat or outcompete native frogs as well. “Arriving like a tsunami,” the expanding toad “front” has now reached the Kimberley region, a known biodive...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research