8 keelbacks hiding together

[cadwallader]

wow thats amazing i guess their population has increased since they have been introduced has gone up with the food source??? thats so cool i would like to keep some colubrids soon

 

[waruikazi]

I know a keeper here in QLD who has been feeding their captive Keelbacks solely on Cane Toads for a couple of years now. I was surprised too.

That goes in the face of the literature i've read on them, i haven't found a credible article yet that says they can survive on toads. I guess the proof is in the pudding but!

 

[scorps]

I know a keeper here in QLD who has been feeding their captive Keelbacks solely on Cane Toads for a couple of years now. I was surprised too.

Yeah I know of someone who had some trouble feeding ones and was using toad legs to get them feeding and I am pretty sure they lived on them for at least the first year or so of there lives

 

[waruikazi]

I know a keeper here in QLD who has been feeding their captive Keelbacks solely on Cane Toads for a couple of years now. I was surprised too.

How big were the toads and the snakes? I've only found 1 keelback that looked like it had eaten a toad in the wild, it survived but was belly up when i found it.

 

[Laghairt]

I guess that keelbacks must be slowly adapting to be able cope with Toad toxins. Given that the toads are such a plentiful food source up north it would be an advantage to be able to eat them. I woukld imagine that the tolerance must be increasing with each new generation.

 

[Bez84]

The toad's poison is deadly to all Australian predators

It’s true that Australia doesn’t have any native toads of its own (it’s the only major continent not to), and that toads have poisons different from those of Aussie frogs. So, many predators are unable to deal with these poisons, because they have never had to deal with them over the last few million years of evolutionary history. But some native frog-eating species are perfectly capable of eating toads. For example, keelback snakes can eat all the toads they like without dying. Many birds also don’t seem to have any trouble, and indeed road-killed toads are a popular diet item for hawks in our study area at Fogg Dam. Native rodents happily munch cane toads without becoming ill. And lots of invertebrates handle the toad’s poison also – sometimes you can see meat ants grabbing and eating huge numbers of tiny toads beside billabongs.

 

[sandswimmer]

I guess that keelbacks must be slowly adapting to be able cope with Toad toxins. Given that the toads are such a plentiful food source up north it would be an advantage to be able to eat them. I woukld imagine that the tolerance must be increasing with each new generation.

This is true, but it's not that they are building up a 'tolerance' as such, which implies physiological change, but rather natural selection is resulting in morphological changes in Australian snakes that are preventing them from ingesting lethal doses of cane toad toxin. The head to bady mass ratio in several snake species is decreasing, meaning snakes are unable to ingest large prey despite a large body size (as snakes are limited by gape size). Thus snakes are less likely to ingest a large toad containing a lethal dose of toxin. This paper is an interesting read for anyone interested:
Phillips, B. and Shine, R. (2004) Adapting to invasive species: toxic cane toads induce morphological change in Australian snakes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 101(49): 17150-17155.

 

[Laghairt]

OK thanks that's really interesting.

 

[Snakeluvver2]

Great paper.
Just had a read of it.
Very interesting.

 

[gus11]

The toad's poison is deadly to all Australian predators
But some native frog-eating species are perfectly capable of eating toads. For example, keelback snakes can eat all the toads they like without dying.

This isn't true, I've seen keelbacks dead with cane toads in their mouths. I've see cane toads fed to keelbacks (part of a research project) which has resulted in the snakes dying. As this paper talks about

This paper is an interesting read for anyone interested:
Phillips, B. and Shine, R. (2004) Adapting to invasive species: toxic cane toads induce morphological change in Australian snakes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 101(49): 17150-17155.

there is an influence of sizes of the toads. keelbacks will still die if eating toads that are to big, due to the poison. there is currently work being done on cane toad size selection by keelbacks with comparisons to other frogs

Gus

 

[The Devil]

This is a pic taken in front of my place. I'm told that it is a keelback and it's the first I've seen in the 20 years I've been living here.