The New New
Can Killer Robots Help Save the Great Barrier Reef?
Researchers in Australia are using autonomous technology to combat a notoriously hard-to-kill pest
I spot one on a clear September morning, while swimming through the lukewarm waters around the Great Barrier Reef. A striking starfish, the color of cabernet and sporting more than a dozen arms, hugs the side of a gently curving ridge of coral. It looks lovely and dangerous, and not just because I know the long spines covering it are lacquered with venom.
This creature, located a two-hour boat ride from Townsville, off Australia’s northeast coast, is known as the crown-of-thorns starfish. While it’s the first one I have ever seen, it’s far from alone. Since 2010, a plague of them, numbering somewhere in the millions, has been methodically consuming the Great Barrier Reef, representing yet another in a series of existential threats to a coral reef system already wounded by intense hurricanes and weakened by bouts of exceptionally warm waters.
Nor is this the first outbreak. Since 1962, their populations have skyrocketed to “outbreak” status on the reef roughly every 17 years, starting north of Cairns and spreading south in waves, the free-floating larvae carried along by currents. After settling on a…
