Robot Submarine Poisons Sea Stars To Save Coral Reefs 106
schwit1 writes: A 30-kilogram robotic yellow submarine is keeping sea stars in check with poison. The sea stars periodically have huge population booms, and a square kilometer of reef can be home to 100,000 of them. They'll kill off the reefs if left unchecked, but humans can only kill a couple sea stars per minute. The task is overwhelming but simple and repetitive, and thus ripe for automation. The COTSBot has "a maximum speed of over two meters per second and an endurance of over six hours. Five thrusters give it the capability of briefly hovering in the water column, giving it time to attack crown of thorns sea stars with an integrated poison injection system. It's completely autonomous, down to the identification and targeting of [sea stars] lurking among coral."
First they came for the sea stars... (Score:5, Funny)
First they came for the sea stars, but I said nothing...
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What could go wrong? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not like humans "correcting" eco-systems they brought off-kilter has ever gone wrong before.
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Re:What could go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we did. Rising ocean temps, dredge spoils and the various things that get into the water from agriculture have seen an explosion in the Crown of Thorns Starfish population, enough to be a threat to the Great Barrier Reef, they leave behind forests of dead, bleached coral, which takes hundreds of years to build up.
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Furthermore, the crown-of-thorns starfish is able to sense white privilege and feed on it.
Re: What could go wrong? (Score:1)
Actually, the Sea Stars are occupying the reef in an anti-gmo, anti-corporate protest.
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Cores of major coral reefs also prove that ice ages completely and totally periodically destroy them. In fact they become way above sea level coastal formations.
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How come ocean pH is rising beyond coral's ability to adapt and survive? Because pollution. Could it be somehow that using the atmosphere and oceans as a place to store massive amounts of human produced waste CO2 actually has a measurable and obvious detrimental effect on variety and stability of delicate ecosystems? Yes, absolutely. What can we do? Stop poisoning the air and water. Make it extremely unprofitable and criminal to do so.
Re: What could go wrong? (Score:1)
Everybody loves nature, except when it does something they don't like.
Re:What could go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: What could go wrong? (Score:1)
And so killing those large predators food source is a fantastic idea to fix everything. I wonder if this is toxic to those predators should they eat poisoned starfish?
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I read the article for you. Executive summary: thiosulfate-citrate-bile salts-sucrose agar is harmless to just about everything but the Crown of Thorns sea star, which, despite it's bold, poisonous, thorny costume has evolved itself to be easy to break down in the stomachs of large predators / autonomous bile-salt inject yellow robots.
I saw a few of these fuckers while snorkeling in Bohol last November. They crawl of nice, pretty blue coral and instantly it is white, dead and petrified.
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There's no fishing in the marine park and sharks don't eat starfish.
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In a 100 years, people will look back on us and say: WTF were they thinking?
No, in 100 years, people will look at the computer screen (or whatever it is that we're using to show information) and go "Shiny!".
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More like "Huh huh, they kicked him in the balls".
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"I don't know why she swallowed the fly."
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There is a 100% chance of this creating havoc in the local ecosystem.
SeaNet Prototype (Score:4, Funny)
Prototype terminator version 0.001 in testing.
Let's hope "SeaNet" doesn't become self-aware.
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Interesting use of technology, I hope it works well. This sort of thing might be a useful way to address the growing problem of invasive species, many of which are aquatic. It seems to be a preferable means of addressing the issue instead of trying to introduce more predator species in an attempt to control an invasive species.
If it doesn't it should carry a "body cam" to review the kills to ensure is it working properly and not killing things it shouldn't.
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it should carry a "body cam" to review the kills to ensure is it working properly and not killing things it shouldn't.
If you see da po-lice, tell a brutha [aphotomarine.com]!
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Crown of Thorns Starfish are killing the great barrier reef off of the east coast of Australia due to an explosion in their numbers, they eat the live coral and kill it.
We're trying to counter the damage they're doing to the reef.
Way to pass judgement when you have no idea what you're talking about.
Calm Down Buddy (Score:1)
The original post failed to mention that the Crown of Thorns Starfish was an invasive species to the Great Barrier Reef. This is also not mentioned in Wikipedia, but in another post on this thread. In other words, we caused the problem and are now trying to fix it. That would make sense.
Given the lack of clarity in the OP, the response, "Who are we to tamper with nature", is perfectly reasonable.
Re: Why?? (Score:2)
Not sure whether you're sarcastic or not but we are well on the path of exterminating ourselves, this is one of the things we can try in order to survive, eat and multiply even more.
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We introduced this species to the barrier reef (accidentally, via bilge water from ships).
It is destroying innumerable living things and the reef itself.
Obviously we should have done better, but the question remains: what is the optimal action to take now to limit total damage?
Kill the starfish, or kill the reef (along with many of the animals that rely on it) indirectly through inaction?
(NB: no time travel allowed)
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We hardly ever see a successful campaign to save critters that aren't fuzzy and cuddly or cute. An exception being the Californian Condor. One amusing bit about the condor is that their numbers are returning nicely but they've moved out of California in droves. It seems they've decided to live in the area around the Grand Canyon as I recall. The Californians spent a lot of money to restore the population and the birds decided to get the hell out of the area instead of staying. I found it amusing when the st
Re:Why?? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why are we humans entitled to dictate nature and kill species this way? "
Because humans like coral reefs more than nature does.
I'm a human supremacist. Greens can bite me, though I have to warn you that would not be vegan.
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Why are we humans entitled to dictate nature and kill species this way? Aren't we supposed to preserve nature and leave it alone? Nature has done just fine for millions of years, it needs no help from us to strike a balance.
Except nature did just fine for millions of years only until we upset the eco-system. The crown-of-thorns population has exploded as a result of human farming causing nutrient run-off into the oceans. We caused this problem, and we're trying to fix it and give nature a fighting chance. The current trend shows that nature is losing this battle badly and the great barrier reef is about to end up on the UNESCO endangered list. The only reason it's not on the list already is because the Australian government is
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because we humans fucked it up in the first place by (accidentally) introducing the species to an alien environment. We humans are now (have been for the past thirty years) trying to fix things by removing every COTS we see on the reef. This isn't dictating to nature, this is damage control.
Because humans are the solution to ... (Score:2)
... and cause of the world's problems ?! Just out of curiousity, why the boom in sea star population? Does this happen regularly ie. part of a natural cycle? And does the interruption of that cycle have any repercussions?
Question: should humans intervene in natural processes that they do not completely understand.
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Question: should humans intervene in natural processes that they do not completely understand.
All actions have consequences. We're already intervening in these natural processes in ways which we haven't even identified, let alone understand. We're pretty clear that the reefs are important to us. We're not driving anything to extinction to preserve them. It's probably justified here. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's probably scads better than introducing some other species to do it; you can switch off the bots.
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Fertilizer runoff. Coral eating starfish apparently thriveh in polluted water. Not a natural cycle at all.
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They weren't anywhere near the reef until humans spread them there in bilge water. So but for us the reef wouldn't be threatened at all. In that sense, any population above zero is unnatural. The booms are caused by agricultural runoff.
At this point, the closest we can get to non-intervention will be to remove every last one of them from the reef.
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If we can slow the rate of predation enough then the coral will have time to adapt.
We should also look for sections of the coral reef which do better against starfish and "breed" it.
Re:Because humans are the solution to ... (Score:4, Informative)
... and cause of the world's problems ?! Just out of curiousity, why the boom in sea star population? Does this happen regularly ie. part of a natural cycle? And does the interruption of that cycle have any repercussions?
Question: should humans intervene in natural processes that they do not completely understand.
Their population growth is due to the nutrients in the water mostly caused by agricultural run-offs and dredging. It's not a natural cycle and they didn't start becoming a problem until the 70s.
This is humans solving human problems. The crown of thorns are destroying many acres of reef at a time which have taken hundreds of years to grow. In terms of the impact of stopping them, coral reefs are the single most ecologically diverse places in the world, and a destroyed coral reef is about as ecologically diverse as a sandy ocean floor, which is to say an absolute wasteland. The loss of the coral reefs would be more devastating to ocean life than over-fishing, ocean acidification (well that also kills reefs), and widespread pollution.
We have been performing population control on the Crown Of Thorns starfish for the best part of 30 years now. The only thing new here is that this machine is more efficient then sending teams of SCUBA divers into the water to perform the task.
You bleeding hearts SHUT YOUR YAPPERS (Score:1)
This isn't an issue where "nature" will work itself out and we aren't slaughtering innocent sea stars wholesale. We as humans have messed up a good chunk of the reef with chemicals and pollution. The sea stars are forced to go eat the good part of the reef left we're trying to preserve because WE as humans took away their habitat. They have little natural predators, reproduce like crazy, and no commercial value.
I for one... (Score:2)
I want to be the first to welcome our poison-injecting robotic overlords.
I do hope whoever wrote the pattern recognition algorithm checked, double checked & triple checked it.
And then sent it for code-review, static and dynamic code analyzers and finally
open sourced it for the swarm of eyeballs that surely audit the code for free.
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Pah! You're so last month. Now we design the design of the design via an asynchronous global supply chain made of turtles.
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it took human intervention (commercial fishing) to fuck things up. Now humans are trying to fix things, this is a step in the right direction since the sea stars' natural predators (giant-arsed snails) were farmed nearly to extinction because they happened to be tasty. Biological controls, eg invading predators, can get out of hand and take over in their own way causing even more damage. This is a great idea since we can simply pull the plug if the system fucks up.
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I must admit, a 20 kg carnivorous snail is pretty cool. But they apparently breed very slowly, a fact for which many other species may be very grateful.
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It is probably quite feasible since the Queen Conch Strombus gigas is farmed commercially, bred, raised and sold for their meat as well as the aquarium trade. They are very cool critters. I had two for pets for many years. They're a big low out on walk about though... (I'm serious.)
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It may be a 20kg snail, but I still find eating a starfish that grows up to almost 1 yard and has 1 inch poisonous spines impressive. A triton will chase a starfish, and the starfish runs when it senses the attacker - but it invariably looses the race against the snail.
Given a mollusc can eat them and so do some fish, it is a bit surprising we haven't found a use for the starfish the the robot finds. Ground up for fish meal and fed to fish farms sounds like an idea.
It's bloody typical of us Australian's.
Let's hope... (Score:3)
...we don't look like sea stars to some galactic race.
In other news ... (Score:1)
Why are coral reefs more important than sea stars? (Score:2)
Seems we are taking sides in Mother Nature's struggles for survival.
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A single species of sea-star is a single species of sea-star. A coral reef is the home and foundation to one of the most ecologically diverse places on earth. Destroy the coral and the place turns into a wasteland.
We should be taking sides. The human analogy is terrorists moving through a city and destroying it, displacing the population and leaving nothing in their wake.
This is just fine ... (Score:2)
Poison in the ecosystem (Score:1)
So what about the dead rotting poison-riddled carcases? Are they going to disrupt the ecosystem?
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According to google that very particular type of cleaner shrimp when observed in the wild with the help of another specific type of worm killed a healthy crown of thorns in just over 2 weeks while it gobbled up coral to the very end.
Re:Poison in the ecosystem (Score:5, Informative)
Lucky us, it's not poison in the conventional sense. The injection is an agar medium that encourages the growth of pathogenic bacteria, in doing so artificially inducing lethal illness which kills the starfish by bacterial consumption, without introducing any harmful toxins into the ocean. I dug up the paper here, [jcu.edu.au] it's actually what my first concern was, bioamplification of the toxin from decomposers to higher-order predators. While COTS seem susceptible to the disease, with other nearby healthy ones, left uninjected, sometimes also becoming infected. Bonus points, another species they tested fared well. (They do note further research necessary, though.)
Lobsters (Score:3)
Need to modify this for lionfish (Score:2)
Lionfish are taking over reefs in Florida. Luckily they are easy to spear since they just stay still. They should also be an easy target for something like this.
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Lionfish swim in the water column, and they can move quite quickly when they want to.
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All of the ones I've speared are sitting pretty motionless above the reef. I'm sure they could move quick but they don't seem to.
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Probably because they don't have to. Not much is going to try to swallow one of those things. They are pretty well defended. Just advertizing their dangerous spines with their colorful garb seems to do the trick.
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Exactly. Except for spearfishermen. Go to YouTube and look up spearfishing lionfish.
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Are they tasty? I don't know anyone personally who has eaten lionfish, but it seems that I've heard good things.
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Clearly, someone's figured out how to make them tasty.
Sometimes it takes death to preserve life (Score:1)
For those of you wondering what the fuck I'm talking about, consider this:
1. Frozen chickens don't grow on trees. You want to eat meat? An animal has to die.
2. Carrots were alive once. You're anti-hunting? Draw the line somewhere. Even fungus is life. You're gonna give up Quorn for your moral stance, or are you going to be a hypocrite?
3. Ever take the train? Thank people like me for the fact that there are fewer rabbits digging under the ties, causing them to sink under their own weight and dropping away de
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who decides that one life form (and a lower one at that) is more valuable than another?
Do you miss the smallpox virus?
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Would you rather cull the lions so that the survivors have enough food to survive the next season and make babies, or would you rather keep them all alive and this side of starving, no kittens next year, and forty or fifty very sick lions?
This isn't a fucking moral issue, it's a practical one.
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100% correct. Because it was like totally us (well, it was actually me that gave the order - whoops!) that put the lions where the antelopes were.