Queezy quolls...

...OK, I apologize. I confess that I had never heard of a quoll until tonight, although for some reason it reminded me of the Kevin Spacey character in The Shipping News. This is a pretty impressive piece of work, though. The northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) is a critically endangered Australian marsupial about the size of a house cat. They're omnivores, feeding on fruits, invertebrates, and the occasional amphibian. It's the amphibian part that's causing problems. The native range of quolls has been invaded by the highly toxic cane toad (Bufo marinus), an invasive toad that has been spread from its native South America to many Pacific and Caribbean islands. When disturbed (and being eaten will do that) they secrete bufotoxin, which has be can be lethal to small predators.

It is to quolls, and ingestion of cane toads is one of the primary reasons that quolls are on the decline. The problem is that quolls are relatively small, and cane toads are pretty big. The toxins of the cane toad, rather than teaching the quolls to avoid feeding them, simply kill the toad-eaters. So, researchers took 62 young quolls and taught half of them a lesson. They did this by feeding them small cane toads which carried a nonlethal dose of toxins and which had also been treated with a chemical, thiabendazole, which induces nausea in animals that ingest it. Video observation afterward indicated that the treated quolls were less likely to attack cane toads when presented with them. When they were returned to the wild, the treated quolls survived as much as five times longer than quolls that had not learned their toad lesson.

I'm not sure about the general applicability of this approach - not sure how many cases there are of introduced species whose toxicity is killing off native predators. But it certainly demonstrates an innovative approach to this particular problem.

Speaking of cane toads....