1 "Everyone was very excited about that," he says, because it meant that there might be a pathogen that would kill the cane toad and only the cane toad. In 1993, CSIRO received another $2 million AUD ($1.4 million US) for four more years of research.
A solution seemed to be near. Hyatt ran some trials at AAHL and found that the viruses killed 100% of their cane toad tadpoles, which is the most susceptible stage in an amphibian's life cycle. "That made everyone more excited," he says, although he was already harboring reservations that the foreign Ranavirus could infect native frogs as well. So, before the project's funding elapsed in 1997, Hyatt's group tested the virus with tadpoles from the white-lipped tree frog, an icon from Australia's rainy north. It killed them, too.
This final experiment was a major letdown for ...
