Hope for lizards threatened by cane toads

Researchers in Western Australia have discovered a way of training goannas to avoid eating poisonous cane toads.

It provides hope of a solution to the growing threat of the toads, which have had a devastating effect on native Australian wildlife since being introduced to the country.

Researchers encouraged a group of vulnerable goannas in the Kimberley region to eat young cane toads, which taste unpleasant but are not large enough to be deadly.

Later, when the advancing large cane toads arrived on the remote flood plain, half of the trained lizards avoided eating the toads.

In contrast, 30 of the 31 untrained lizards died almost immediately after the toxic critters arrived.

"Encountering a small live cane toad can change a predator's behaviour in ways that protect it from subsequent encounters with large cane toads," the report said.

"Releasing small toads then can offer a simple landscape-scale method to conserve wildlife populations by giving native predators an opportunity to learn rather than die."

The report said it was the first real evidence that the strategy is realistic.

The method has previously only been used to train captive-bred animals such as quolls.