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Funding secured to fight Crown of Thorns outbreak

Over 5,000 Crown of Thorns starfish, or "alamea" have been killed recently in American Samoa waters in an effort to halt the damage caused by this marine plague, and destroying this pest is being conducted in a collaborative effort carried out by the National Park Service of American Samoa, the Coral Reef Advisory Group, the National Marine Sanctuary Service and the Department of Marine Wildlife Resources (DMWR).

 

Samoa News spoke with National Parks Services Marine Ecologist Tim Clark who explained their latest effort to get rid of the Crown of Thorns, known locally as "alamea".

 

“Normally it's OK… we have few of them every once in a while come up on the reef.  However, when we get a lot of nutrients in the environment from land sources,  especially after a big storm when things get stirred up, then we have a lot nutrients in the water that fuel a Phytoplankton bloom. This is when the larva in the Crown of Thorns do really well, and then we get an outbreak of thousands of them all over our reefs.

 

 "This is when they go through and wipe out the coral,” said Clark.

 

“Once you lose the corals, you lose everything associated with the coral. It takes about fifty years for a coral reef to come back after a big disturbance like that,” he explained.

 

He said that the park service was able to get some emergency funding to bring nine divers to the territory who are Marine Archeologists. These divers travel around the world documenting and preserving ancient shipwrecks, and they have agreed to come and help kill the Crown of Thorns outbreak here in the territory.

 

 According to Clark, the divers have been on island for two weeks with a few of them leaving last night and some staying for another week. He said that the divers brought with them Rebreathers, which according to Clark is a different type of dive technology. Rebreathers are a technical dive apparatus that lets them stay underwater for 4-5 hours at a time and also enables them to dive to greater depths.

 

“We are able to stay down for long periods of time and cover the entire reef on the bottom all of the way to shoreline and this has allowed us to have a heavy impact on the Crown of Thorns,” he said.

 

The divers have killed 5,519 Crown of Thorns around the island just in the last two weeks and they will be working here for another week,” he said.

 

Clark says if you see an alamea or Crown of Thorns, please contact Alice Lawrence of DMWR at 633-4456 — and he cautioned not to touch them as the Crown of Thorns are also very poisonous.

 

BACKGROUND

 

In the late 1970s, millions of crown-of-thorns starfish ate their way through Tutuila's reefs. According to NOAA, more than 90 percent of all the living corals were destroyed. At the time, Fagatele Bay was not a National Marine Sanctuary, but this disaster propelled the decision for the site's designation.

 

The NOAA website cites scientists, headed up by Dr. Charles Birkeland and Dr. Alison Green, who use this natural disaster as a baseline for their long-term research to monitor the recovery of a coral reef.

 

Because corals grow slowly, the research team chose a multi-year cycle of data collection. Beginning in 1985, and again in 1988, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2007, the team amassed information on coral, fishes, invertebrates and marine plants. This database is unique for Samoa and the study is one of the few long-running surveys of its type in the world