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Robot Submarine Poisons Sea Stars To Save Coral Reefs
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, but I said nothing...
It's not like humans "correcting" eco-systems they brought off-kilter has ever gone wrong before.
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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)
Fertilizer runoff. Coral eating starfish apparently thriveh in polluted water. Not a natural cycle at all.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"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.
Allegedly they considered building robots, because the crown-of-thorns' natural enemy, the giant triton were nearly harvested to death, only eat one starfish a week, and only reproduce slowly in their natural environment.
Technology aside, if a 20 kg carnivorous snail isn't cool, I'm not sure what is.
Wonder if anybody has considered coming up with ways to efficiently breed these guys? I think they'd make awesome pets.
...we don't look like sea stars to some galactic race.
It begs the question, "What animal keeps these critters populations down, and why isn't out there doing it?"
... 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.
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 pouring billions of dollars into its protection.
Lobsters eat sea star fish and are much tastier than a robot, perhaps we should breed thousands of tasty meals to eat up star fish.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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, 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.)