Qld: COTS continuing destructive march: report

AAP General News (Australia)
12-18-2001
Qld: COTS continuing destructive march: report

By Jordan Baker

TOWNSVILLE, Dec 18 AAP - The Crown of Thorns Starfish is continuing its destructive
march along the Great Barrier Reef leaving devastation in its wake, a study has found.

An Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) report on the extent of COTS during
2000 found the number of starfish eating the reef had grown.

It found the outbreak was moving south to Townsville and leaving inshore reefs in the
Cairns-Innisfail area with their lowest coral cover level since 1992.

Monitoring Program Leader Hugh Sweatman said there was not enough research available
to show whether the latest problem was worse than past outbreaks.

"The Crown of Thorns is having an effect on the coral over a lot of the Barrier Reef,
you can see it's got down as far as Townsville and into the Whitsundays," he said.

"It's bad, but whether it's worse than the last (outbreak in the mid 1980s) we can't
say - all we can do is watch."

The study showed reefs in the Cooktown-Lizard Island area were recovering but many
reefs in the Innisfail region had large COTS populations.

There was more evidence of declining coral cover on reefs near Townsville than in other
regions of the reef, while the Whitsundays were stable.

The Capricorn-Bunker group had the highest average coral on the reef in 2000.

Dr Sweatman said patterns seemed to suggest outbreaks started in the Cooktown area,
with the current gradually moving COTS south as they exhausted food on each reef.

"The Crown of Thorns eat coral, the coral takes years to regenerate and they basically
eat themselves out," he said.

"They can't stay forever on the reef, the population then dies back and the coral regenerates
- at least that's what you would like to happen."

Dr Sweatman said some coral grew back in five to 10 years.

"That gets you some coral cover, but whether it's actually the same species composition,
that's another matter," he said.

There have only been three recorded COTS outbreaks - in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
in the mid 1980s, and this outbreak, which began in 1993.

AAP jb/mg

KEYWORD: REEF

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