Conditioned taste aversion is a real, peer-reviewed intervention. A quoll is offered a small dead toad — too small to deliver a fatal dose — laced with a nausea-inducing agent, lithium chloride. The animal eats it, feels unwell, and forms a lasting aversion to the taste and smell of toad.
Programs · Behaviour · Top End
Cane Toad Aversion Training
Cane Toad Aversion Training teaches juvenile quolls, before their first wet season, that toads are not food.
We prepare the baits as sausages, deploy them ahead of the toad front, and follow up with collared release cohorts to measure survival. Trained juveniles survive their first wet season at markedly higher rates than untrained ones.
It is an odd sentence to write in a program description — we make toad sausages — but the method works, and the alternative is a population that learns nothing and dies.
Support this work
Give to QED and the field team allocates where it is most needed, or back a specific line item under this program.