To A Place Unknown: 23.June.2016 (Day 18)

A light at the end

I don’t think I ever gave a very good explanation why I’ve been driving so far the past week (and even more so this weekend, but more on that later).

The plan

As a refresher: the cane toads were first introduced to Queensland (site 1, green square) in the 1930’s to help control a pest of sugar cane. This spot is really lush, green, and wet. Very similar to their native habitat in Central and South America. They wasted little time spreading throughout the area.

They didn’t spread very far south because it gets so cold in the winter and it was assumed it was too dry for them to spread very far west (aside from Antarctica, Australia is the driest continent).

Nature loves to find a way though.

In addition to being one of the driest, Australia is literally the lowest and flattest continent on the planet. When it rains, all the rivers swell and burst sending water (sometimes not very deep) over huge areas of land.

That’s the golden hour for cane toads.

Every wet season they scatter across the countryside and follow the water. As the water starts to dry up most of the toads dry up with it and die. Some of the toads, however, make it to semi-permanent ponds (or hotels that water their lawns too much) and a new population pops up and waits for the next wet season to start spreading again.

It took them a long time to get past the Gulf of Carpentaria (site 2, red square). It’s very dry, very hot, and there aren’t many roadhouses for them to snuggle up with over the long dry season.

But they made it anyway.

Eventually they made it into the top-end (site 3, green square) where it’s a similar climate to their natural habitat and Queensland. Yet again, they spread out and established themselves all over. Now they’re continuing to head west into yet another dry climate (site 4, red square).

I’m sampling toads from each area to get a representation of their chronological spread and compare wet (1), dry (2), wet (3), dry (4) climates. Last weekend we went a little too far south into site 2, a perfect example of toads spreading out during the wet season and then dyeing off when the water runs out.

I’ve successfully collected from site 3 and 2. This weekend we’re driving ~13 hours to collect toads on the farther western edge of the Northern Territory (fingers crossed we’re successful) at site 4.

I don’t want to ignore my other projects though. Water pythons are beautiful animals but they’re pretty big and really strong. Bleeding a children’s python by myself is somewhat easy, they’re pretty tiny.

Water pythons are another story.

They’re long, strong, and down to get some biting on when you try to take blood from them.

A quick stop at the hardware store bought everything I need to restrain these big boys so I can collect blood from their heart without hurting them.