New ways to control cane toads 

  Host: Professor Rick Shine 

  Tuesday 18 November 2025, 6.15pm – 7.30pm 

  Macquarie University

Overview

In 1935, agricultural scientists foolishly brought a giant frog species from South America to tropical Queensland. As these cane toads spread across northern Australia, they fatally poisoned native predators that attempted to consume them. 

This talk will briefly review the story of the toad invasion, and then explain how new ways of thinking and new methods are providing encouraging results in the battle to stop the toad. We can protect vulnerable native predators by teaching them to avoid toads; and genetic-manipulation techniques enable us to use cane toads to control their own populations.

Biography

Professor Rick Shine is a Professor at Macquarie University and one of Australia’s leading biologists. He has won a host of international and national awards for his long-term research projects on reptiles and amphibians. 

He believes that the most effective new approaches to conservation will come from hard evidence about ecological processes; and has worked on topics from endangered-species management through to sustainable harvesting of tropical reptiles. Much of his work focuses on snake ecology, but for the last two decades his team has also tackled the problem of invasive cane toads.