TEAM BUFO - A BRIEF HISTORY
Bringing together a group of talented, energetic, dedicated research scientists and university students willing to accept the challenge of working in a remote area, the formation of TEAM BUFO has generated an enormous increase in our understanding of cane toads and their impacts on biodiversity.
Some members of TEAM BUFO at our field station, Middle Point, N.T.
Funding from the Australian Research Council allowed Rick to bring
Dr Greg Brown
from Canada to Fogg Dam to carry out research on snakes. Greg settled in, and was already an expert on the ecology of the local area before the first toads poked their heads over the horizon. Greg expanded his work to study the toads, mostly by radio-tracking. He surveys roads in the area every evening, so was able to capture the very first toads to arrive, and strap miniature radio-transmitters to them on waist-belts. A few years and tens of thousands of toads later, Greg is now the acknowledged authority on field biology of invasion-front toads.
Dr. Greg Brown holding a Slatey-grey Snake on the Fogg Dam wall.Dr. Ben Phillips had already done his Ph.D on "adaptations of the Queensland reptile fauna to cane toads", so he came to Fogg Dam to base his studies there. Ben started out working on how local snakes deal with these invasive amphibians, but increasingly his work has shifted to look at the toads themselves, and especially how they have been changed by the process of invasion.
Dr. Ben Phillips with a King Brown Snake in the lab.Like Ben and Greg, Dr Jonno Webb evolved from a research emphasis on snakes to one that included toads also - in Jonno's case, the interaction between toads and native mammals. With further ARC support, the group expanded to include an expert on tadpole biology (Dr Michael Crossland). Dr Ligia Pizzatto came from Brazil to help us explore the effects of parasites on toads, and Dr Jason Kolbe came from the USA to try to work out why the toads' southern front (in New South Wales) is moving so much more slowly than the northern front.
Dr. Jonno WebbThe other main group in addition to the postdocs comprises the graduate students – people that are doing their Ph Ds (doctorates) by conducting research. The Ph D students have had a wide range of projects, including frog-toad interactions (Matt Greenlees), bird-toad interactions (Christa Beckmann), lizard-toad interactions (Sam Price-Rees), crocodile-toad interactions (Ruchira Somaweera), toad pheromonal communication systems (Mattias Hagman), and the biology of toad parasites (Crystal Kelehear). In 2009, we were joined by three more Ph D students, to study the toad invasion process (Reid Tingley), toad habitat use (Edna Gonzales-Hernal) and the ecology of toad tadpoles (Elisa Cabrera-Gusman). On the Queensland coast, John Llewelyn is doing his Ph.D studies based at James Cook University (JCU, in Townsville) to work out how frog-eating predators manage to coexist with the toxic toads. And we also began working collaboratively with colleagues from other universities
– like Professors Ross Alford and
Lin Schwarzkopf at JCU,
Dave Skelly at Yale University (USA),
and Mark Urban at The Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara (USA).
More recently, Dr Raju Radder from India added to the international nature of Team Bufo, and also added considerably to our collective ability to play cricket. Unfortunately, that input was tragically cut short in 2008, when Raju suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting his parents in India. He was 38 years old.
The late Dr. Raju RadderOne important group within Team Bufo has been the Honours students – fourth-year undergraduate researchers. Each project only lasts a year, unlike the three years for Ph D students. The first Honours group came up to Fogg Dam in 2006, to study sexual interactions in toads (Haley Bowcock), the distribution of metamorph toads (Travis Child) and the effects of lung parasites on young toads (Crystal Kelehear). The following year, David Nelson joined us to look at how predators learn to deal with toads, and then Georgia Ward-Fear started research on whether meat ants might help to reduce toad numbers. Stephanie O’Donnell has been trying to teach captive northern quolls to avoid cane toads, and then releasing these marsupials to see if her training has been effective in helping the quolls to survive. And Dave Llewelyn is up at Fogg Dam now, exploring the idea that toads at the invasion front have less effective immune systems than do the toads further back in the Australian range. If that’s true (and the evidence is mounting to say that it is), we might be able to find real weaknesses in the invasion-front toads that would allow us to control their numbers. For more information about these scientists, see the University of Sydney - the Shine Lab web page And throughout the entire evolution of Team Bufo, Melanie Elphick has played a central role in organising everybody, and making sure that things happen as they should. More recently, Adele Haythornthwaite (in Sydney) and Michelle Franklin and Nilu Somaweera and Christine LeRoux (at Fogg Dam) have joined the administrative and technical side.
Melanie Elphick, a founding member of TEAM BUFO.
One of TEAM BUFO's field vehicles, Fogg Dam, N.T.In a remarkably short period of time, we had created a major group, with a wide range of techniques and expertise available – so the research really took off. Team Bufo continues to further our understanding of this invasive species. One of our main aims with this website is to provide reliable evidence about cane toads in Australia, backed up by scientific research. We haven't put lots of details about that evidence on the main pages, but it's easy for you to get to it. If you want to explore a topic in more depth, just click on Rick's "official" University of Sydney website.
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