Forget cricket bats, golf clubs or carbon dioxide, Australia has found a new weapon in its war on the cane toad: cat food.

University of Sydney researchers found that cat food left next to ponds in the Northern Territory attracted meat ants, which then attacked baby cane toads emerging from the water. The results were published in the British Ecological ­Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.

It is the latest idea in the battle against the cane toad, which was introduced from Hawaii in 1935 in a failed attempt to control beetles on sugarcane plantations. Their population, now in the millions, threatens many native species across Australia.

Early eradication methods included hitting the toads with golf clubs or cricket bats. In recent years, freezing or gassing them with carbon dioxide has been used.

The toads emit a poison that attacks the heart of predators. But meat ants are impervious to this.

Rick Shine, a professor of evolutionary biology who supervised the research, said: "A single toad can have 30,000 eggs in a clutch, so there's a heck of a lot of tadpoles turning into toads along the edge of a billabong. You can literally have tens of thousands of toads emerging at pretty much the same time. They are vulnerable to meat ants if the colony discovers there is a source of free food."

In 2008, researchers studied thousands of toads emerging from ponds lined with cat food and found that 98% were attacked by the ants within two minutes. Of those that escaped, 80% died within a day from ant-inflicted injuries.