Unwelcome Guests In My Pond

[Better is Betta]

My fish pond is joined to my carport so every time I park the car I have to walk past the pond. I have convicts and native empire fish in the pond. When I walked past them I noticed a dead convict, then another the day after and then a dead empire fish. I thought what the!!!!. On close inspection I saw millions of black tadpoles in the pond. They were cane toad tadpoles. I've had my pond for 6 years and never once encountered this. These little buggers are very toxic just like their parents. So it looks like the fish had a feed on some of them and died. I had to siphon the whole pond to get rid of them. Now its time to cull these toads again. So its rubber gloves a garbage bag and a torch. They are so bad in Australia I managed to fill up a garbage bag full of toads over 100 in one night. They should have tarred and feathered to DH that brought them into the country. Ah feel better now had my gripe for today

 

[Baccus]

I am guessing that your pond is in the ground, but if it is I would have expected the cane toads to have got in it earlier than this. My current ponds ( a 1000L round horse trough and an old bath tub) are both above ground but the cane toads still sometimes manage to get in the bath tub. At my old house there was a large pond in the ground and of course the cane toads were always in it but the only deaths with the goldfish seemed to occur when the randy cane toads tried mating with the large goldfish and actually managed to suffacate them (They grasp them around the gills and hang on for grim death). Other wise the toads never seemed to cause a problem (except for eating smaller native frogs and eating native birds and animals valuable food sources

). And even though I hate cane toads they do have a use......

once dead they make wonderful fertilizer all their poison breaks down into harmless compounds. Even with all the goldfish waste and cane toads in the water every night an echidna still thought the pond had the best drinking water around. The only way I have found to stop the toads finding their way into a pond is to fully mesh the pond a few centimetres above the water (but that's not much fun if you have birds that like having a dip in the pond nor is it appealing in looks) making sure there are no gaps for toads to squeeze through. Otherwise raise the pond above ground (with the top a good 60cm above the ground) and have nothing plants, ornamnets, or rocks near by that the cane toads can clamber up. Otherwise make a trap for the cane toads and or go out every night with a torch and catch them to reduce their numbers. I recall a bloke on NEW INVENTORS making a Cane toad trap and think it is now on the market. Just PLEASE be sure that the all the toads you catch are cane toads and not some of our great native toads. It never ceases to amaze me people who can't tell the differance and its sad so many go to an (often cruel) early grave because people assume all toads are the same.

 

[nurglespuss]

I believe cane toads were introduced to control insect crop pests (didn't work out).

When they mate its called 'amplexus' and you can in fact even sometimes find giant 'death balls' of frogs or toads, that have gotten so carried away with latching that they all drown.

If its this much of a problem, I agree physical barriers are the best, and combined with traps are very effective.

Nocturnal animals (or ground moving animals in general) will tend to 'follow' barriers rather than climb them, and so if you position a large trap/s along the barrier (good things are very deep holes with bucket at bottom) they will naturally move towards them.