Scientists Built A Robot to Hunt This Starfish

Crown-of-thorns starfish are large, spiny, and eat coral reefs and without enough natural predators to control their population, someone had to create one.

Host: Hank Green (he/him)
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[Wolfsgeist]

They really missed a chance here to call the robots Star Destroyers.

[toads_ftw]

I do this job for a living, hunting these starfish, ive seen litterally 100s of thounsands (i describe them as the locusts of the reef) in 8 days diving 7 of us culled 33 thousand roughly. Needless to say they chewed the reef hard. Glad CoTS are finally getting more awareness!

Weeoow thanks so much everyone! I have passed this onto many of crew that have come through the vessels. For an update still doing it and its going good! Its now may 2024 and im a skipper of one of the vessels!

[errorcrj]

Imagine getting your own Bizarre Beasts episode but all they're talking about is how to kill you.

[fissionphoenix]

The fact the bot seeds coral while killing the coral-eaters is amazing. It's like if your species was driven tp near-extinction by a single nefarious group of demons, but some divine entity sends a mechanized champion that helps your population return to bre-destruction levels and assassinates all the evil dark-starred demons.

[milesprower]

Starfish Robot Assassin is a videogame i want to exist

[panzerschiff]

So now even Starfish have to worry about being dronestriked.

[instaperil]

I'm wondering why I never thought about how starfish eat. Not disappointed.

[gothic-aqua]

I remember in a Pokémon game a few years ago there was a Pokémon based on a crown of thorns starfish called mareanie that attacks corsola and I never realized that the interaction was based on how the starfish actually damage reefs

[Zedigan]

The fact that it can also seed coral and test water quality makes me think that the rangerbots would be very easily altered or tinkered with for other marine conservation jobs that may come up, perhaps in the future we'll see them using ai to do species count estimations

[robadc]

-What do you do for a living?
-Oh, I manage an extra national group of robotic assassins

[buriedghostlady]

How amazing that they found a relatively easy to get, and inocous to other animals venom that kills the starfish fast. Like, it's usually much more complicated than that

[philb]

Starfish: leisurely devouring coal reefs, yummy

Killer robots: WE ARE THE BORG. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

[mattdeblassmusic]

Well, shoot, there goes the plot of my epic sci-fi/horror story about monster starfish rising from the depths to devour human livers.

[notafan]

4:00 Now I see why Toxapex's defenses are so stupidly high, damn.

[mikki]

My dive instructor in Hawaii always carried a net for removing crown of thorns.
It's quite funny to watch a cots run in terror from a giant triton since it's such a slow chase.

[Weiner-Worm]

"Correctly identified the crown of thorns 99.4% of the time"

RIP to the lost 0.6% ⚰

[austinbyrn]

Random recommendation for a bizarre beast. The naked mole rat is the only mammal that is eusocial, and it is a thermoconformer (meaning they are practically cold blooded). A university professor I had had done studies with naked mole rats and I truly learned how bizarre they were from him.

[foux]

How bad is it?
"The scientists decided to create an army of murderbots to solve the problem" bad.

[arcticdino]

Crown of Thorns: Ha ha, I'm invincible!
Snail: Who left all this free food here?

[MB-sqyn]

Heard about these things first from a show called 'Barney's Barrier Reef', a BBC nature show that talked about various lifeforms in the GBR.

Normally it was a light hearted/edutainment show, talking about various ways creatures used mucus, poop, bits of reef debris, colours, and so on.

But from what I can remember, every single time the Crown-Of-Thorns was talked about, it was in a much more serious tone compared to everything else, and was in a way the main villain/antagonist of the show due to the fact that they're mostly known for how much damage they cause to the reef at large.