Couldn’t we engineer a fish that’d preferentially eat starfish?
Well, more like “fuck this invasive species of starfish that is destroying our already-threatened coral reef.”
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Supposing you wanted it sterile to keep it from itself getting out of control, isn’t that basically what this is?
Even with better engineering skills than we have it would be hard to make things so preferential, particularly because we’re only talking about a single type of starfish. The robots seem like a much easier and safer approach.
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Until it mutates, or runs out of food and starts eating other stuff. Then we’re back to the lizards/needle snakes/gorilla problem again.
Wouldn’t making it tasty serve the same purpose?
Gorilla gumbo.
Welp, gotta add “swim in the ocean” to that list of things I won’t do because of what I’ve read on BB recently.
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Thought I read this story before, but nope, slightly different:
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Am I the only one that can’t figure this out?
“This one-shot poison (which is harmless to everything else on the reef) is what makes autonomous robotic sea star control possible, since it means that a robot can efficiently target individual sea stars without having to try and keep track of which ones it’s injected already so it can go back and repeat the process nine more times.”
Ooooh, bandname!
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What’s with you and not liking killer robots today? You feeling OK?
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Then they’re basically back to the problem they already have… the ones that currently like eating the starfish are too tasty.
I read it as: the poison they created can kill the starfish after one injection, so they don’t need to worry about coming back and injecting the same one(s) multiple times over time to kill. Once the visible ones in an area have been injected, it can move on in its pattern and forget about that spot.
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Killer robots good. Biological weapons better. Tasty biological weapons, even better!
It’s about the hierarchy of values. 
Yes. Just unleash the fishing team a bit later, after the starfish are gone. This is by design.
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I, for one, welcome our…ahhhh nevermind.
Yeah, but aren’t they naturally invasive? These starfish already exist in this ecosystem, and the population is booming largely because of natural processes in this ecosystem (according to the article, anyway). It seems kind of arbitrary that we’ve selected starfish at the undesirable species and coral as the desirable species, just because the starfish are having a good run.
Aren’t we meddling with a naturally-occurring process here?
No more than the extirpation of non-native species. You can call it “culling the herd” if you want. The goal is the same.
Do we also cull the plankton herd? Their population got out of control first, which is what led to population growth in the starfish. What happens if there’s a drastic increase in other types of plankton due to culling the starfish population?
Populations expand past a sustainable point, then they contract. That’s what happens in nature. Should humanity always get involved in this process?
These are good points, and the answers, or lack of answers, must be carefully considered.
I can’t speak to the validity of this project, but I also don’t believe that humans shouldn’t try to influence nature on principle.
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What could possibly go wrong?
That’s what makes it so exciting, though. Whenever I read about something like this, I get to spend a few minutes wondering if THIS begins the process that ends with me becoming a poet warlord.
Something must.
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