page_title: Cane toad
section_title: Australia
hierarchical_section_title: Cane toad / Introductions / Australia
caption_attribution_description: English: The range of the Cane Toad (Bufo marinus) in Australia.
context_page_description: The cane toad, also known as the giant neotropical toad or marine toad, is a large, terrestrial true toad native to South and mainland Central America, but which has been introduced to various islands throughout Oceania and the Caribbean, as well as Northern Australia. It is the world's largest toad. It is a member of the genus Rhinella, which includes many true toad species found throughout Central and South America, but it was formerly assigned to the genus Bufo.
  The cane toad is an old species. A fossil toad from the La Venta fauna of the late Miocene of Colombia is indistinguishable from modern cane toads from northern South America. It was discovered in a floodplain deposit, which suggests the R. marina habitat preferences have long been for open areas. The cane toad is a prolific breeder; females lay single-clump spawns with thousands of eggs. Its reproductive success is partly because of opportunistic feeding: it has a diet, unusual among anurans, of both dead and living matter. Adults average 10–15 cm in length; the largest recorded specimen had a snout-vent length of 24 cm.
  The cane toad has poison glands, and the tadpoles are highly toxic to most animals if ingested.
context_section_description: Following the apparent success of the cane toad in eating the beetles threatening the sugarcane plantations of Puerto Rico, and the fruitful introductions into Hawaii and the Philippines, a strong push was made for the cane toad to be released in Australia to negate the pests ravaging the Queensland cane fields. As a result, 102 toads were collected from Hawaii and brought to Australia. Queensland's sugar scientists released the toad into cane fields in August 1935. After this initial release, the Commonwealth Department of Health decided to ban future introductions until a study was conducted into the feeding habits of the toad. The study was completed in 1936 and the ban lifted, when large-scale releases were undertaken; by March 1937, 62,000 toadlets had been released into the wild. The toads became firmly established in Queensland, increasing exponentially in number and extending their range into the Northern Territory and New South Wales. In 2010, one was found on the far western coast in Broome, Western Australia.
  However, the toad was generally unsuccessful in reducing the targeted grey-backed cane beetles (Dermolepida albohirtum), in part because the cane fields provided insufficient shelter for the predators during the day, and in part because the beetles live at the tops of sugar cane—and cane toads are not good climbers. Since its original introduction, the cane toad has had a particularly marked effect on Australian biodiversity. The population of a number of native predatory reptiles has declined, such as the varanid lizards Varanus mertensi, V. mitchelli, and V. panoptes, the land snakes Pseudechis australis and Acanthophis antarcticus, and the crocodile species Crocodylus johnstoni; in contrast, the population of the agamid lizard Amphibolurus gilberti—known to be a prey item of V. panoptes—has increased.
caption: Distribution of the cane toad in Australia (map out of date – current range includes northern WA, northern NSW, NT and QLD)[74]
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