Word: reefs
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...quarry is finally lured with tubs of whale blood off the Australian reef. In the last reel, the prep-school Ahab finally spots his béte blanche, and both drama and cinema achieve an almost hallucinatory suspense. The crew is lowered in barred aluminum cages. The sharks, at first floating like malignant dirigibles, suddenly bash the metal in rage and frustration. It is more than a cinematic high. It is a justifiable anthropomorphism, a juxtaposition of hunter and hunted that Melville, or for that matter Moby-Dick, would have savored...
...should anyone care about the land mollusk, or even the Southern bald eagle? Because, as ecologists keep repeating, all species are interrelated in the biological pyramid. Destroying one can adversely affect many others. A prime example is Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is being eaten away by starfish. Some scientists speculate that the ecological balance was upset when man began to remove their natural predators...
...efficient dispatch of the starfish convinced Wickler and the Talbots that the painted shrimp, in sufficient numbers, might quickly bring the crown-of-thorns under control and end the threat to Pacific reefs. Although the shrimp are not common around Australia's Great Barrier Reef and other threatened areas, they could be mass-produced in laboratories and set free in the ocean; a single female, laying between 100 and 200 eggs at a time, can theoretically produce a new generation of adult shrimps every 18 days...
...contrast, other methods of containing the crown-of-thorns seem hopelessly inadequate. Divers have already injected thousands of the creatures off Pacific reefs with lethal solutions of formaldehyde, but the population continues to explode. Indeed, Australian scientists recently reported that the starfish have so seriously damaged the Great Barrier Reef that it will take at least 20 years to recover...
...that sits in the center of the building. Billed as the world's largest glass-walled fish tank, it holds 200,000 gallons of sea water filled with small sharks, sea turtles, moray eels and dozens of other creatures that dodge in and out of a huge simulated reef. The visitor can peer into the tank either through a vatlike opening at the top or through the glass walls as he walks down the curving ramps that surround it. The layout is so unorthodox that it seems more like an undersea version of Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral...