Vinegar used as weapon against reef threat

A 2012 study carried out by the Australian Institute of Marine Science showed that along with tropical cyclones, the crown-of-thorns starfish is one of the leading causes of coral loss in the Great Barrier Reef over the past 27 years.

The starfish occur naturally upon the reef but can reach plague conditions when conditions are right, such as when phytoplankton, their food source, becomes more abundant from floods washing fertilisers and other pollution from land into the sea.

Researchers were able to discover that vinegar is a simple yet effective way to deal with coral-eating starfish.

James Cook University scientists in Australia have made a breakthrough in the war against a deadly enemy of the Great Barrier Reef.

Bostrm-Einarsson said the findings were exciting.”Currently divers use 10 or 12mls l of ox-bile (pesticide) to kill each COTS”.

‘We used 20ml of vinegar, which is half the price and can be bought off the shelf at any local supermarket, ‘ lead author Lisa Bostrom-Einarsson said. Aside from the rarity of this substance, it is also expensive, necessitates permits and should be at a certain concentration.

“There’s no reason to think it won’t work or it’ll be unsafe , but we have to be sure”, she said.

The findings could have big implications for developing countries which don’t have the means to acquire and use current drugs, she said. But for now, it’s the only weapon we have to help slow their growth. With an estimated 4 to 12 million of the starfish on the Great Barrier Reef alone, and each female capable of laying 65 million eggs in a single breeding season, the starfish menace is a real one. “[Scientists] managed to kill around 350,000 previous year with two full-time boat crews”.

She said other researchers were working on population-level controls of the animal, but killing the starfish one-by-one was the only method available at the moment.

“Ideally we could stop outbreaks from happening all together”, says Boström-Einarssonfrom. And a team of researchers at Queensland University of Technology has even developed an automated Terminator-like underwater robot, that swims around injecting any CoTS on sight.

One method conservationists have used to some effect is injecting them with ox bile, but researchers have now discovered that a simple dose of vinegar can do much the same job, promising to significantly cut the cost of an expensive battle to rid a World Heritage Site of this damaging pest.

Find out the latest coral reef research over at James Cook University.