Depth study! Please help! (1 Viewer)

[Touyaa747]

I have a depth study on Module 3 (Biological Diversity) and there's a section asking us to design an experiment to investigate the Sydney cane toad population and I have no ideas on how to approach this at all.

"Cane toads are excellent 'hitch-hikers' and it has been found that some cane toads have travelled on trucks to Taren Point in Sydney and it is feared that they have set up breeding population here. This could effect the natural wildlife in a devastating way."

Your task is to design an experiment that is to gather some information about this cane toad population. What information your experiment gathers is your choice but it must be useful to the people who are trying to find out more about this population and ways to exterminate these pests... You must be able to justify how your experiment is useful..."

Any ideas?

 

[OriginalCopy]

You could look into the reproductive cycles or fertilisation of cane toads and ways to make them sterile? Or look into a virus that can kill cane toads w/o harming humans (like they did with rabbits and used mosquitos)?

 

[Touyaa747]

That's what I thought at first too but my teacher said that that kind of information would probably belong in the justify part. I don't know any good way to collect information. She said our aim would be something to do with collecting data about the abundance or distribution of the cane toad population (or something to that effect). Any good ideas ?

 

[BLIT2014]

Could you use some kind of capture re-capture experiment with discs?

 

[ConquerHSC]

An alternative method to mark-recapture is removal sampling. It minimises the disturbance effect from prior sampling periods that would lower the recapture rate and population estimate. There is a 1996 study to estimate on cane toads' population in Australia by Peter Bayliss showing how disturbance effect decreased recapture rate significantly. The removal sampling method is commonly used by fisheries biologists for population sampling.