Well done guys! There was an amazing effort done by our volunteers in cleaning up Tioman Island’s reefs. Most of our dive sites had a small number of Crown of Thorns (COT) in July 2018, but you guys did an amazing job! Crown of Thorns injection is the most effective methods to control COT outbreaks.
Our volunteers even decided to dive on a rarely explored portion of reef and found over 50 COTs at one site! We hope you will want to return again soon and that other divers will follow suit! Luckily we have the COTs pretty much under control thanks to our regular Crown of Thorns injection events.
Crown of Thorns (COT) starfish are found on coral reefs in the tropics ranging from the Red Sea, throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is a coral eating starfish which can destroy vast areas of hard coral reefs within just a couple of month.
Worldwide, coral reefs are facing the danger of COT outbreaks. Popular dive spots such as the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and the coastline of Sharm-el-Sheikh in the Red Sea have not yet recovered from catastrophic outbreaks in the late 1990s. It is believed that the main reasons for the regular explosions in population is the nutrition rich water due to pollution and also the collection of their main predators, the Triton snail (Charonia tritonis) with its beautiful shell, which you find nowadays almost only in souvenir shops.
Read more on our dedicated Project AWARE pages.
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