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Conservationists have trained cute endangered quolls to avoid the toxic toads that kill them.

Northern quolls () are small marsupials that vaguely resemble ferrets. They live in small patches of northern Australia, and eat a mixed diet.

However, the quolls鈥� undiscerning ways have been their undoing. In 1935, poisonous cane toads () were introduced to Australia to control pests. In the early 2000s they hopped their way into quoll territory 鈥� and the quolls, knowing no better, ate them and died in swathes.

The was so bad that quolls, already in retreat due to factors like habitat loss from fire, were . They are now .

To save the quolls from extinction, some were moved to the toad-free English Company Islands off Australia鈥檚 north coast. There, at the University of Technology Sydney and his colleagues have tried to prepare the quolls for a return to the mainland.

Quoll school

The team trained the quolls not to eat cane toads by feeding them non-poisonous toads that contained a chemical that induced nausea.

鈥淸The quolls] subsequently associate the smell and taste of toads with illness,鈥� Webb says. This 鈥渃onditioned taste aversion鈥� training has been used in conservation before. For instance, in the 1980s conservationists to avoid eating eggs, to protect birds on the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The team then reintroduced 29 quolls 鈥� 22 trained to avoid cane toads and seven with no training 鈥� to on the Australian mainland, where they had gone extinct. They tracked the marsupials using radio collars, which could tell whether the animals were alive.

Six of the seven untrained quolls were poisoned within days, compared with just four of the 22 trained quolls 鈥� a relative success. At least three quolls survived for at least 21 weeks. Another seven met an uncertain fate, sometimes because they lost their radio collars.

Out of the poison, into the fangs

Unfortunately, the quolls may have forgotten how to escape predators in the safety of the English Company Islands. Dingoes () promptly dispatched the last of the untrained quolls and at least six of the trained ones.

鈥淚t could have been that the quolls lost some of the behaviours that helped them survive,鈥� Webb says. Also, Kakadu has seen large fires, destroying the foliage quolls use to escape.

However, there is a possible solution: the team could teach dingoes to avoid quolls, just as they taught the quolls to avoid cane toads. They would use 鈥淭rojan鈥� quolls carrying unpleasant chemicals in special collars.

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