Cane toads can be contained without bounties, baseball bats or people on the dole, according to a Queensland professor dedicated to eradicating the invasive species.

Fifteen years of Queensland research has identified and proven a lethal "cane toad smoothie" that prompts cane toad tadpoles to turn cannibalistic and eat cane toad eggs.

Professor Rob Capon from University of Queensland's Institute of Molecular Bioscience, with his bottled cane toad baits. Tony Moore

Last summer, it eliminated more than 1 million cane toad tadpoles in Queensland.

But Professor Rob Capon said he needed $130,000 a year to employ a second research scientist dedicated to the project at Queensland’s Institute of Molecular Bioscience.

He would also like a chance to push his case with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Since then-premier Peter Beattie first lured Professor Capon to Brisbane from Victoria early last decade to run the IMB at the University of Queensland, beating cane toads has been his passion.

Instead of "toad-busting" with baseball bats or nine-irons, Professor Capon’s technique uses the cane toad’s chemical ecology to lure tadpoles to eat their own eggs in the shallow water.

“The key observation was that the tadpoles can do this even when the water is murky and black and you can’t see anything,” Professor Capon said.

“We discovered that they must have been following the scent.”

Between 2004 and 2012, his team identified the smell that lures the cane toad tadpoles back to the eggs and created a smell bait, which is created in the laboratories as a toad smoothie from toxin in toad toxin glands.

Essentially, it resembles the smell of a dead toad.

“But the thing with a dead toad is you can’t put one in your glovebox, whereas with our baits, you can,” he said.

Since 2016, baits have been distributed to a network of volunteers as tablets, called Bufo Tabs. Volunteers put the tablets into traps in shallow water.

“The tadpoles all swim in through the funnels because they think there is a huge pile of cane toad eggs in there,” Professor Capon said.

“It is going gangbusters. In this last summer we have given out thousands and thousands of baits and it would be in the order of 1 million tadpoles that we have caught.”

The baits have been tested by 55 organisations including councils in Brisbane, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Ipswich, Logan, Moreton Bay, Scenic Rim, Tweed and the Whitsundays, as well as many golf courses, ecological firms, conservation groups and the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.

The University of Queensland and the University of Sydney developed a world patent (2012) for the cane toad eradication project.

“We didn’t take out the patent to get rich,” Professor Capon said.

“We took out the patent because to get this to a commercial product some company would need to spend a sizeable amount of money to get the manufacturing right, to get the regulatory approvals in place and generally make a marketable product.”

They spent four years looking for an Australian company willing to take up the patent. That search proved unsuccessful and they eventually sold it in 2016 to Springstar, a pest control firm in Washington, DC.

They said it would take four to five years to get a product to market.

“Unfortunately they haven’t probably delivered a proper business case,” Professor Capon said.

Professor Capon then set up a “citizens-science” Cane Toad Challenge project with Springstar’s approval, allowing the Bufo Tabs to be further tested by businesses and schools in rivers and streams.

In blunt terms, Professor Capon’s postgraduate students provide unpaid labour to build the baits, while Professor Capon still tries to sell the idea and expand a fledgling phone app.

His most recent public relations exercise was a December 2018 presentation sent worldwide at the Brisbane TEDx conference where he introduced his cane toad smoothie.

He is now writing a submission to a House of Representatives inquiry into defeating cane toads and is readying himself for a five-year trapping trial on already-chosen bushlands.

But he needs help to take his cane toad smoothie to a bigger scale.

“It is just a time issue. We have no funds and it is not my full-time job,” he said.

“It is my part-time job and the staff I used to have have been let go because the project for which they have been funded is over and they have gone.

“So we are down to one person who works in the lab – Dr Angela Salim – and I can use some of her time.”

Instead, Professor Capon hopes to use council-employed staff to do the field research.

The $130,000 would let him employ a scientist or perhaps a science teacher to co-ordinate the project.

Professor Capon can talk about politicians and cane toad bounties. Suffice to say, he considers it expensive, inefficient and foolish.