Acanthaster planci
has few natural
enemies that might
effectively reduce its
excess population.
Removal is minimally
helpful in preventing
their depredations
on stony-coral
populations.
opmental stages this species has hardly any enemies that
might effectively limit its population. After three years,
the surviving larvae become adult starfishes that breed
and themselves produce larvae.
Normally there is, on average, one specimen of this
starfish species per 5 square miles ( 13 km2) of reef. But
during population explosions, it is possible to find up
to 50,000 specimens in a single square kilometer (.386
square mile). Tens of thousands of these starfishes have
been destroyed, for example in the Philippines, by div-
ers who gather them and incinerate them on land or
kill them on the spot with injections of poison. In one
major action almost 50,000 specimens were killed in Sa-
moa, and 13 million were killed in the Ryuku Islands. It
normally takes around 25 years for coral reefs that have
been seriously damaged by a Crown of Thorns invasion
to recover completely.
—Daniel Knop
RefeRences
Knop, D. 2011. Hochwasser in Australien: Wassermassen
bedrohen das Great Barrier Reef. KORALLE 67, 12 ( 1): 12.
Heat-loving deep-sea copepods
The Census of Marine Life, probably the largest international effort to record the biodiversity of our oceans, is
