AUS Press x2: More grief for Timor: cane toads

AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION 09 September 08 Australian troops blamed for Timor toad invasion
Farmers in some parts of the tiny nation have accused the Australian Defence Force of bringing in cane toads.
Now they are are calling on Australia to help fix the problem.
The Australian-led International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) entered the country in 1999.
Many of the Australian troops and vehicles came directly from Darwin, where the cane toad is now a permanent resident.
Simplicio Barbosa, who is Timorese and works for the NGO Care International in Dili, says he has seen cane toads as big as his hand in parts of the country, and the Australians are to blame.
"Yes, there are many here brought by them, the INTERFET," Mr Barbosa told The World Today.
"It is actually dangerous here because it kills like chicken or like somebody steps on them, especially kids.
"[The cane toad] is really, really poisonous. It kills a lot of chickens here."
Mr Barbosa says he has travelled to some districts in East Timor where people believe the cane toads were deliberately brought into the country by the Australian Defence Force to deal with poisonous snakes.
"When I went there to the district, they told me that the Australians brought the toads in order to kill the snakes," he said.
Darwin's Lord Mayor Graeme Sawyer is also passionate about eradicating the cane toad from the Top End.
He says it is highly likely that the pests hitchhiked into Timor aboard Defence vehicles.
"Cane toads are fantastic hitchhikers; they love crawling up under machinery and stuff to refuge during the day. Also they get into loads of freight and stuff, they've turned up all over Australia in that mode, so it's quite likely," he said.
Mr Sawyer says the Australian military needs to take precautions including quarantining vehicles in cane toad proof compounds before they are sent to east Timor.
"We'd like to see the military step up some of their operations against toads on military land right around Darwin, but I'm not aware of procedures that they've got for their overseas stuff," he said.
"I understand the Tiwi Islands and people like that have spoken to them about making sure they don't bring toads onto the islands."
The Defence Department has released a statement saying they are aware of claims cane toads were introduced by Australia's first military intervention in East Timor.
The department says that while vehicles and equipment from government and non-government organisations were transported from a range of different Australian ports to East Timor during the last nine years, it would difficult to pinpoint the source of the introduced species.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/09/2359866.htm

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (Australia) 09 September 08 More grief for Timor: cane toads
Australia's military may be responsible for introducing into East Timor the nation's worst pest - the cane toad.
The resilient and toxic toads, which have wreaked havoc across Australia, are believed to have hitched a ride on military vehicles.
Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon today said he would investigate the matter further when asked about the claims during a brief visit to Darwin.
"The Australian Defence Force does have very strict quarantine controls," he said.
"I've only seen these reports very recently in the newspapers since I've been on the road.
"On that basis I have not had an opportunity to seek a briefing from the Chief of the Defence Force but I will certainly do so."
Since 1999 - when the ADF first intervened in East Timor - vehicles and equipment from a variety of organisations have been transported from Australian ports to the fledgling nation.
Simplicio Barbosa of the Dili-based Care International told ABC Radio that the toads arrived with the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET).
"[There are] so many toads in East Timor, they are brought by the INTERFET," he said.
"We don't know how to get them away, how to kill them."
Since the arrival of cane toads arrival in Australia in the 1930s, they have spread from Queensland, where they were originally introduced to kill pests in the cane fields, to northern NSW and across into the Northern Territory.
The invading frontline is less than 50 kilometres from Western Australia, having already ravaged the world heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, killing everything and anything that eats them, from crocodiles to quolls.
Toadbuster and Darwin Mayor Graham Sawyer said there was every chance the toads, which are able hitchhikers, sneaked into East Timor on a piece of machinery or in a soldier's backpack.
The NT Government recently built a fence at a Darwin port to stop stowaways from hitching rides on barges out of the harbour.
In December 2006, one of the warty blighters was found on remote Elcho Island, off the northern Arnhem Land coast. It most likely made the trip on a barge from Darwin but possibly swam the 1.5 kilometres.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/more-grief-for-timor-cane-toads/2008/09/09/1220857529134.html

cut-and-pasted from HerpDigest:

Timor Toads Aren't Aussies, Says Expert Ric Shine
9/9/08 ABC.NET.AU

The species at the centre of the East Timor toad row is not found in Australia but is common in Indonesia, an Australian expert says.

A Timorese environmental group has accused Australian peacekeepers of introducing cane toads to East Timor during INTERFET operations in 1999.

In their report to the East Timorese government, the Haburas Foundation says cane toads either hitch-hiked on military equipment brought from Australia or were delibratly introduced by troops to control mosquitos.

But the University of Sydney's Professor Ric Shine has examined a photo presented in the report and says it is a case of mistaken identity.

He says the culprit is in fact the asian black-spined toad.

"For someone who doesn't study toads in excrutiating detail, you'd have to say that a very high proportion of the toads of the world look incredibly similar," he says.

"People are incredibly bad at identifying frogs in general and cane toads in particular, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if people were confused between a black-spined toad and the cane toad.

"One of the community groups in Sydney ran a campaign ... to report cane toads, and I think of the first 100 cane toads reported by the general public, 98 were not cane toads and indeed one was a blue tongue lizard."

Three other Australian cane toad researchers have seen the photo and agree it is an asian black-spined toad.

That toad is common throughout Indonesia and has been rapidly expanding its range over the last few years, but has not been found in Australia.

Professor Shine also thinks it is incredibly unlikely that a cane toad could have hitched a ride across the Timor Sea.

"There's been one or two individuals over the years, but it basically doesn't occur."

And that, he says, may be good news for the Timorese, given the cane toads' path of destruction across northern Australia.

"Nobody's really looked at the impacts of the black-spined toad, [but] presumably because it's smaller, the effects won't be quite so dramatic," he said.

"You're looking at a part of the world in which cane toads occur close by, so that the dangers of the spread of this species would be much lower in that many of the places it would get to have already got toads of other species so the local fauna is already able to deal with the poisons of the toad, or has adapted or has learned not to try to eat them."

It is news that will also be welcomed by the Defense Department, which has strongly denied claims made in the Haburas report.