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i thought it was lobsters
It's hard to comprehend the destruction this ethereal creature could do in its lifetime — a juvenile crown-of-thorns starfish, raised in a lab where researchers have discovered worrying new findings about its progression into adulthood.
Research published today from the University of Sydney and Southern Cross University's National Marine Science Centre in Coffs Harbour has found the crown-of-thorns starfish will eat a much more varied diet as juveniles than previously thought, making them worryingly resilient.
As juveniles the crown-of-thorns starfish are vegetarian, favouring a particular type of algae.
But the study found they they would eat much more in order to survive.
"We initially thought that they only ate crustose coralline algae but we found that they can also eat biofilm, which is a mixture of diatoms, bacteria, and other microorganisms that grow pretty much everywhere in the ocean," Dr Mos said.
The findings offer a significant change in thought on the life cycle of the crown-of-thorns starfish, and raises the spectre of it being a much more dangerous predator.
Journal Reference:
Dione J. Deaker, Benjamin Mos, Huang-An Lin, et al. Diet flexibility and growth of the early herbivorous juvenile crown-of-thorns sea star, implications for its boom-bust population dynamics, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236142)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday July 25 2020, @07:50PM (1 child)
Dunno, but if I heard something being referred to as the cockroach of the sea I would assume it to be pretty damn resilient.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Sunday July 26 2020, @08:20AM
They are, you can hack them to pieces, poison them, smash them, and they just keep on going, they grow new starfish from the hacked-up pieces. There are a few effective poisons such as injecting each one individually with some horrible chemical-biological mixture, but it's a pretty horrific way to kill them in terms of what it does to them.