麻豆淫院

By mimicking one of their own scents, researchers have found an efficient method of culling the highly destructive crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster).

Over the course of its one- to two-year lifespan, a single crown-of-thorns starfish (CoTS) can consume up to 200 kg of coral tissue across an area of roughly 10 square meters. On its own, this may not seem catastrophic. But during outbreaks, swarms of thousands of starfish can strip hectares of coral tissue in just a few months.

This overconsumption doesn't just degrade reef health and stability by depleting hard-bodied, reef-building corals. It also damages long-term resilience, preventing reefs from adapting to their greatest threat: climate change.

Currently, the main method of combating CoTS outbreaks is by manually culling each starfish one-by-one, which is highly inefficient, labor-intensive, and costly. But now a team of researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan and the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia have discovered that CoTS use their characteristic spines to "smell" peptides and communicate with one another, even outside mating seasons.

Building on this finding, the team has created a synthetic peptide that consistently attracts CoTS at very low concentrations and with no toxicity. This technology could lead to the further development of potent pest-management peptides鈥攄ubbed Acanthaster attractins鈥攖hat prompt the starfish to congregate at one spot, enabling the efficient culling of many CoTS in one sweep. The research is in iScience.

"Through genomic and proteomic analysis, we found that the CoTS spines are used to both sense and secrete a wide range of peptides鈥攏ot just defensive toxins," explains Professor Noriyuki Satoh, head of the Marine Genomics Unit at OIST.

"These may promote swarming, and so we synthesized the peptides that we suspected function like pheromones for communication and found that they consistently affect the trajectories of the starfish. With these attractins, we hope to contribute to the development of an efficient and safe measure against CoTS outbreaks."