Coral-killing starfish curbed by fishing ban

lavrock submitted, created time 5 months 1 week (environment.newscientist.com)

IF YOU want to save coral reefs from rapacious starfish, you should ban fishing.

The crown-of-thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci, preys on corals in some of the most biodiverse and threatened reefs in the world, dwarfing coral losses from storms and bleaching. The predator is less devastating in "no-take zones" of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, however, where fishing has been banned since 1989 (Current Biology, vol 18, p R598)

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Fishing Bans May Save Corals from Killer Starfish

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 2 weeks (www.sciam.com)

Good news for the world's vanishing corals: a new study shows that commercial fishing bans in Australia's Great Barrier Reef kept a lid on coral-gobbling starfish.

"This is definitely good news for coral," says John Bruno, an associate professor of marine science at the University of North Carolina (U.N.C.) at Chapel Hill.

Researchers found that there were as many as seven times fewer outbreaks of coral-killing crown-of-thorns starfish—which can have up to twenty spike-covered arms and grow up to two feet (0

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