4.5 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hey, this is Floral Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday. |
0:06.4 | Today in the show, engineering cannibalistic tadpoles to solve an invasive species problem. |
0:13.5 | This is the first time that I felt some optimism that we could actually do something about controlling canoads. |
0:24.0 | Cantoes are one of Australia's most destructive invasive species. |
0:29.5 | Picture a football-sized brown toad with poison skin, |
0:34.4 | so animals like dogs, snakes, even crocodiles will die if they try to eat them. |
0:39.0 | And scientists have been trying for decades to reduce their population. |
0:43.4 | Now researchers have turned to the gene editing technology CRISPR to create cannibalistic tadpoles |
0:49.4 | that never grow up and eat their brethren's eggs. |
0:52.8 | You heard that right. |
0:54.0 | So how does this work and could |
0:56.3 | this be the solution to Australia's cane toad problem? Here to tell us more is Dr. Rick Shine, |
1:01.0 | an evolutionary biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who's leading that effort. |
1:05.8 | He's also the author of the book, Cain Toad Wars. Rick, welcome to Science Friday. |
1:13.2 | Thank you. Let's start with some history. |
1:19.3 | How did cane toads end up in Australia in the first place? Well, cane toads are native to a big area in South America, and people had the brilliant idea that they might be great to control |
1:25.4 | beetle pests in sugarcane plantations. So they were brought |
1:28.9 | to islands in the Caribbean, then to Hawaii, where they were growing a lot of sugar. And in |
1:35.2 | 1935, the Queensland government sent a chap called Reg Montgomery over to collect 101 cantoads, |
1:43.4 | brought them back to Australia, and their offspring were released |
1:46.7 | in the sugar cane fields of northeastern Queensland. |
1:51.4 | And what kind of damage have they done and what makes them so destructive? |
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