Trail cam solves mystery after gruesome find next to Aussie dam: 'Very precise'
A trail camera in a rural Queensland town has captured an incredible act of evolution by an Australian animal. On the edge of a dam, the camera filmed the moment a rakali, a native water rat, takes down its prey – a poisonous cane toad that the rodent has adapted to eat, leaving behind nothing but the skin, bones and toxic glands.
Cane toads are the result of one of Australia's worst environment blunders, originally introduced in Queensland in 1935 to help control pest beetles in Queensland. The invasive frogs are now spreading across the north of the country, and towards the southwest, at a rate of up to 50km per year, with experts struggling to stop the march of the toad.
While the toads do have predators, there are not many who are able to eat one and live to tell the tale. The poisonous skin glands in its shoulders kill goannas, quolls, snakes and even crocodiles.
One native animal who has learned to fight back against the destructive species is the rakali, a large aquatic rat found in all states and territories. The highly intelligent rodents learned to hunt and kill cane toads in less than two years after the toads moved into their habitat, a study from the University of Melbourne found.
When Hayley Troupe found a dead cane toad by her dam in Blackbutt, in southeast Queensland, she had an inkling there could be a rakali behind it.
'There was a lot of precision because all of the skin was there, the poisonous glands on the back were still there, and there was bits of bone around,' she told Yahoo News.
'It was obviously something that's been very precise in its eating and obviously skilled at eating it without eating the poisonous bits.'
While she'd never seen a rakali on her land before, she had a trail cam that she regularly set up around her five-acre property and decided to move it close to the water's edge to catch the elusive animal in action.
Two days later, her camera recorded the moment a rakali attacked a cane toad, showing how it flips the toad on to its back to avoid the poison glands.
Rakali commonly target larger toads and will eat their heart and liver. They've been known to move the gall bladder — which contains toxic bile salts — out of the way and also remove the skin off the toad's legs before consuming the muscle.
Hayley, 35, said the rat must've had a 'feast' as she'd found about 10 other toad carcasses in the days that followed.
'It's great that they've learned that, but it's a shame that a lot of the other native species haven't yet. There's a lot of species that are suffering because of cane toads, like quolls, for example. They haven't worked out how to eat them safely,' she said.
Hayley, who works for Queensland Conservation Council as their Nature Organiser, shared the video on the QCC Facebook page where it quickly garnered more than 1.3 million views.
'It shows you that people love nature and they like learning about it. But I guess it would be nice if we could get that sort of enthusiasm in protecting nature as well, and pushing our governments to protect habitat," she said.
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