Starfish peril to Great Barrier Reef

SYDNEY: The Great Barrier Reef was under attack from a species of starfish measuring more than 1m across and which spent half its life eating coral, scientists said yesterday.

Australia’s top tourist attraction had lost half its coral in the last 27 years and the crown of thorns starfish was responsible for about 42 percent of that shrinkage, researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science said. Only storm damage from tropical cyclones (48 percent) had a greater impact, with bleaching responsible for the remaining 10 percent.

“There is a strong case for direct action to reduce (starfish) populations and further loss of corals,” the authors wrote in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. T

They said coral cover could increase by nearly 1 percent a year without the damage done by the Ancanthaster planci.

Each female of the species can lay 60 million eggs in a single breeding season.

The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s best-protected coral reef, is an assembly of 2 900 individual reefs stretching 2 600 kmdown the east coast. It draws 2million visitors a year and underpins tens of thousands of jobs in tourism.

The team undertook 2 258 surveys on 214 areas over 27 years. It speculated that the decline could have begun long before the research project began in 1985. The scientists said improving water quality by reducing the run-off of fertiliser and pesticides from farms on the east coast could slow the march of the coralmunching starfish. They warned that coral cover was predicted to fall up to 10 percent in the next decade in the absence of progress to mitigate factors, including starfish numbers. – Sapa-dpa