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The Crown of Thorns Starfish is extroidenary it is so crazy dude it will kill you if you look at it evenin picture

It may look threatening, but I can't help but think it's misunderstood. Does it actively seek the destruction of the human race? I don't believe so. 80.43.15.59 13:58, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

How can we know what it seeks? I don't doubt that it would devour us all, given the chance

I'm having trouble finding the species featured on "Planet Earth" by the BBC, which grows up to a metre in diameter! Thus knocking COT starfish off the "Biggest Starfish" throne. It was the called the sunstar but I can't find a single article!

The crown of thorns can grow from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a dinner plate. An exceptionally large crown of thorns can grow to be the size of a car tire. Divers kill these predators by injecting their own stomach acid into each of their many legs.If even one leg is missed the sea star can live on.Before overpopulation, crown of thorns kept the fast growing coral from overpowering the slower growing coral. Now it destroys coral mercilessly.

I'm having a hard time believing the part about the stomach acid. If someone can find a reliable source for this, go ahead and put it back in. Dave6 07:40, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I didn't originally add this information, but it was all taken from the 2004 program, Predators of the Great Barrier Reef. It just aired again on The Science Channel, and I watched and verified the info, including the part about the poison used being the same poison the animal uses to digest its prey. I put the above text back into the article and cited it. -Artificial Silence 21:23, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

User 74.134.241.176 deleted the now cited text. "sorry for such a large deletion, but what i deleted needs to be re-written and also flushed-out in order to be intelligible or useful" [sic]. Text is both intelligible and useful, and if it needs rewritten, there is no reason it cannot stay in the article. I have no idea what he or she means by "flushed-out". Artificial Silence 03:23, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

I've heard this is true, they used to kill them by cutting them up, or putting them through a shredder, but they regrew from the pieces. I don't have a source for the info. 203.143.238.107 06:12, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I didn't find any references for the removed section. This document Controlling Crown-of Thorns Starfish explains techniques for killing these animals. Injection with poison can be done in less than a minute, so I assume you don't have to inject each leg. Also, I doubt they would survive a shredder, but the document linked here explains why they don't normally cut them up to kill them. --MattWright (talk) 17:09, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I found a paper about the effectiveness of dry acid as well as wet acid injections in managing crown of thorns starfish— it does not however seem to be stomach acid since the starfish belongs to a family of starfish known for eating through eversion of the stomach. The paper can be found here: http://www.gov.mu/portal/sites/ncb/moa/farc/amas2003/pdf/p4.pdf. It should also be worth mention that starfish lack a formal brain and are known to have clusters of ganglia; generally most animals in similar anatomy (such as sea cucumbers, flat worms and terresterial worms) are known to reproduce asexually through splitting. The reason for explaining this is that it states in the paper that seperated parts from the starfish can spawn new starfish due to their digestive and cognitive physiology.

[edit] Potential source

"Well known professor of biology and history, Jan Sapp in his book What is Natural? A Coral Reef Crisis , talks about the entire story of how the outbreak of the crown of thorn starfish (COTS) was first discovered on Green Island. He analyses all issues associated with COTS controversy, from Australian politics to the Great Barrier Reef ecology."

I removed that bit from the article, as it sounds like a good source, but as written doesn't contribute much to the article. --MattWright (talk) 04:23, 5 February 2008 (UTC)