Over the years, the Crown of Thorns starfish (COTs) has inhabited the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, coexisting with many other species. It is native to the Indo-Pacific region and feeds mainly on corals. In fact, it has always been the Great Barrier Reef's greatest threat; however, during the previous year's stats, its number had multiplied, thereby causing more damage to the reef's corals (up to 40 percent).
This is bad news for the famous reef, which is one of the world's wonders for many years. Actually, there are divers who regularly check the area, maintain the safety of the corals by eliminating the harmful starfish, and inject lethal injections of poison to the starfish alone. Yet, its outbreak had destroyed a significant part of the reef and even with the divers' daily efforts, the whole area is just too much to be maintained, especially the fact that it would take at least 20 manual lethal injections to every tentacle before completely killing it.
Nonetheless, the future seems promising as scientists from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia have developed a submersible robot that would aid the eradication of COTs and save the Great Barrier Reef from a threat. Matthew Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub created the COTsbot with special features such as computer vision that is trained to detect the starfish and automatically injects it with the special formula created by James Cook University to aid the aquatic robot.
COTsbot has the necessary capabilities to navigate its way around the reefs and has sonar GPS even on the surface. It would be deemed completely safe to other organisms as it would take a photo and would need human approval when in doubt before making any actions. "We've always built robots that would have a negligible environmental impact, even if we lost them... Even the injection system has multiple levels of safety built in... the bile salts themselves have no known environmental impact," Dunbabin says.
Its specifications and design were already released and currently, they are trying to slowly deliver it to the reefs. Hopefully, this would be the solution to the famous marine pest for good.
