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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...
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.
"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.
The article mentions it in passing, but the biggest contributor to the problem is over fishing of the large predators that should be present on the reefs - sharks, groupers, etc. That upsets the entire ecosystem.
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.)