Stinky sausages made of cane toad flesh have been scattered from helicopters in a wide-scale trial that researchers hope will give native animals a fighting chance.

The sausages were air-dropped across a remote Kimberley cattle station just ahead of the cane toad frontline.

They were developed as part of a taste aversion program to try to prevent native species like quolls from being killed by the toxic toads.

“We flew over those areas and dropped the sausages about every 100 metres and then we looked at the impact on the quoll populations both before and after that event,” said lead researcher David Pearson.

“Our trapping results aren’t all that encouraging as we didn’t catch too many quolls on either side after the toads had come through.

“We still have to work through our remote camera data to see what happened.”

Voracious predators, quolls are getting aversion therapy aimed at teaching them not to go near deadly cane toads. Photo: AAP

While some of the quolls did not seem too keen on the sausages, the researchers are confident the technique can be refined.

The first cane toads to arrive in an area are the biggest and most deadly, so the hope is that by feeding native animals cane toad meat, laced with a nausea-inducing chemical, at least one or two of the animals can be trained not to eat them.

After that, the research hopes the quolls should be able to co-exist with the smaller and less deadly cane toads that follow the frontline.

The technique, based on successful similar programs run overseas with different species, proved promising in small scale trials done in the East Kimberley.

With cane toads now about halfway across the Kimberley and tracking steadily towards Broome and Derby, the researchers hope the technique could help prevent localised extinctions.

Disgusting recipe

The cooking process begins at a drop-off bin at a park in Kununurra where locals deliver live cane toads they have scooped up from gardens or roads.

The toads are killed by the recommended method of freezing, before Parks and Wildlife officer Andrew Rethus starts the unenviable task of chopping up them up.

“So we’re removing the legs from the cane toads and then removing the skin from the legs to leave just the bones and meat,” he said, demonstrating his amateur butchering.

“Then it goes into a container to be sent down to Perth to be turned into sausages.”

The toads emit a strong odour as they are pulled apart.

“It’s a pretty tough job, but it’s interesting,” Mr Rethus chuckled.

Sausage factory

Two thousand kilometres south at the Harvey bait factory, the refrozen chunks of cane toad are fed into a noisy machine to be roughly chopped.

Worker Rob Brazell is responsible for adding a crucial ingredient — a strong, nausea-inducing chemical that will make any animal that eats it temporarily sick.

“So we’ll take the flaked toad meat and put into the mixer-mincer machine where we’ll be mixing it with the Thibenzole which is a nausea-inducing agent,” he said.

“Then it’ll be and minced out on a finer grain before we put it through the sausage-making process.”

The sausages are then sent north again and loaded onto helicopters for distribution at Theda Station.

The timing is critical, as the sausages need to be fed to the quolls just prior to the first cane toads arriving in the area.

The researchers take turns flying in a Robinson 44 helicopter, tossing the sausages out into the dense bush below.

Reeking of cane toad scent, these nauseating snags are helping to save endangered wildlife. Photo: ABC/Jasper Cruse

“The problem, if you drop anything out of a helicopter in the Kimberley, is that there are lots of things that want to eat it,” researcher David Pearson said.

“One of the problems we’ve got is that ants get into a small sausage very quickly so we’ve really got to deliver those sausages at a time when quolls are going to find them.

“Typically in the late afternoon we’ll be dropping them out of the helicopter.”

Some quolls ate the toads, but there was not a large enough sample taken for the findings this time around to be conclusive.
The researchers will be tweaking the sausage design and delivery.

“We’re going to have to do some more fine-tuning of the sausage to make it more palatable and interesting for quolls, and indeed something they then associate with cane toads,” Dr Pearson said.

-ABC