“The great thing about the lure is anyone over the age of 18 in the community can use it and ultimately, working together is the only way we are going to stop the spread of these introduced pests. “We collect the donated toads, often more than 250 a week in the summer months on the Gold Coast alone, and use their glands to make the lures for the tadpole traps,” he said. Mr Mayr said Watergum had already coordinated several cane toad freezer collection sites across southeast Queensland, where people deposited humanely killed toads from their backyard. “They’re also incredibly problematic for producers in rural areas, where they decimate native dung beetle populations, which leads to lots of health problems for stock and affects dam water quality.” “Cane toads have a detrimental impact on native species such as frogs, birds and reptiles, and are even responsible for some species, such as the Spotted-tailed Quoll, being declared endangered. “We see this agreement as an opportunity to coordinate different regions across the nation to work together to have an impact on cane toad breeding cycles and reduce their numbers.
“Like a lot of Australians, we are passionate about getting rid of cane toads and stopping them from spreading further south and west,” Mr Mayr said.
Watergum president Wal Mayr said the deal granted his organisation the exclusive rights to distribute the lure across Australia and was another tool in the fight against the invasive introduced species. UQ’s commercialisation company UniQuest granted the licence to not-for-profit Watergum, an organisation dedicated to driving environmental cultural change through grassroots community education. The environmentally friendly lure developed by UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience researcher Professor Rob Capon and Professor Rick Shine from the University of Sydney uses pheromones from adult cane toads to attract tadpoles, trapping them before they grow and reproduce. Australia may soon have the jump on cane toads after a Gold Coast not-for-profit was granted an exclusive licence to market a University of Queensland-designed lure for the invasive pests.
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