PLoS One
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia.
Published: July 2017
The crown-of-thorns starfish Acanthaster planci (COTS) has contributed greatly to declines in coral cover on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, and remains one of the major acute disturbances on Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Despite uncertainty about the underlying causes of outbreaks and the management responses that might address them, few studies have critically and directly compared competing hypotheses. This study uses qualitative modelling to compare hypotheses relating to outbreak initiation, explicitly considering the potential role of positive feedbacks, elevated nutrients, and removal of starfish predators by fishing. When nutrients and fishing are considered in isolation, the models indicate that a range of alternative hypotheses are capable of explaining outbreak initiation with similar levels of certainty. The models also suggest that outbreaks may be caused by multiple factors operating simultaneously, rather than by single proximal causes. As the complexity and realism of the models increased, the certainty of outcomes decreased, but key areas that require further research to improve the structure of the models were identified. Nutrient additions were likely to result in outbreaks only when COTS larvae alone benefitted from nutrients. Similarly, the effects of fishing on the decline of corals depended on the complexity of interactions among several categories of fishes. Our work suggests that management approaches which seek to be robust to model structure uncertainty should allow for multiple potential causes of outbreaks. Monitoring programs can provide tests of alternative potential causes of outbreaks if they specifically monitor all key taxa at reefs that are exposed to appropriate combinations of potential causal factors.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5201292 | PMC |
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169048 | PLOS |
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Third Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources, Xiamen, 361005, China.
Background: Outbreaks of the coral predator Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (CoTS) pose a severe threat to coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. In 2018, the South China Sea (SCS) experienced significant CoTS outbreaks, leading to extensive coral mortality across the Xisha, Zhongsha, Dongsha, and Nansha Islands, severely impacting the coral reef ecosystem.
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School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia. Electronic address:
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School of the Environment, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072, QLD, Australia.
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