Word: corals
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...with venomous spines that can temporarily paralyze a swimmer and provoke fits of vomiting. Known to biologists as Acanthaster planci, this sinister-looking, 2-ft.-wide starfish is an even greater menace to some of its tiny aquatic neighbors. It likes nothing better than to feed on the living coral reefs where it makes its home...
...alarming. Once a relatively rare nocturnal predator, the crown-of-thorns suddenly began proliferating in the South Pacific a decade ago. Since then it has laid waste to 100 sq. mi. of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest and most impressive collection of underwater coral formations. It has also destroyed nearly 22 miles of Guam's coral barrier. Marine biologists report similar starfish damage off Saipan, Fiji and the western Solomons. In only five years, says Oceanographer R. D. Gaul of San Diego's Westinghouse Ocean Research Laboratory, the starfish can destroy...
...effective against many germs that are resistant to penicillin), has already been developed from a mold that was recovered near a sewer outlet in the sea off Sardinia. The search, recently intensified, extends from the Sea of Japan to the frigid waters of Antarctica, from the tepid shallows of coral reefs in the Caribbean to the far-western Pacific...
...week, he had scarcely dried off from a scuba-diving, sponge-hunting expedition on the outermost edge of the Caribbean, between the British islands of Virgin Gorda and Anegada. Burkholder made his dives with an assistant, Robert Brody, who is completing his doctoral work on the gorgonians, or "soft corals." Together they snipped off specimens of the most familiar gorgonian, the purplish fan coral, and a variety of sponges (of which about 5,000 species are known...
...Gulf Stream's powerful current around uncharted "hills" on the ocean floor. Their 140-ton craft was helplessly tossed about in the rush of water and actually shoved 28 miles west-out of the stream. They were nearly as surprised by what seemed to be huge coral formations at an unprecedented depth of 1,700 feet-indicating that the coastline around Charleston, S.C., once lay 70 miles farther out in the Atlantic...