After tasting nausea-inducing toad butts, crocodiles in Australia learned to avoid the poisonous live version. Crocodile deaths dropped by 95 percent.
All it takes is one miserable night after a bad dinner or drink to make humans avoid an ingredient for life. To teach freshwater crocodiles in Australia to avoid a lethally poisonous toad, all it takes is one very, very nasty toad butt.when the poisonous amphibians came hopping along. The result could help prevent the predator die-offs that occur as cane toads make their way across the Australian continent, researchers report August 14 in).
To train the crocs, Ward-Fear and her colleagues worked with the Bunuba Rangers, members of an Australian Indigenous group who see freshwater crocodiles as an important part of their dreamtime stories. They collected about 2,400 dead toads and removed the heads, poisonous glands and internal organs. The researchers laced the remaining toad butt with lithium chloride, a chemical that produces powerful nausea.
Crocodiles learned quickly that once was enough when it came to dead toad butts. The researchers found remarkably few carcasses of crocs who’d dined on live cane toads. At one site — Danggu Geikie Gorge National Park, where toads had already arrived, rangers found 63 dead crocodiles in 2020. But after the team baited the group of crocs that came to the same area in 2021, only three died from eating toads. At another site, Bandlingan National Park, no crocodiles tasted toads after their training.
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This ancient crocodile looked kind of like a dolphinAndrew Paul is Popular Science's staff writer covering tech news. Previously, he was a regular contributor to The A.V. Club and Input, and has had recent work featured by Rolling Stone, Fangoria, GQ, Slate, NBC, as well as McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He lives outside Indianapolis.
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