Word: reefs
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...Flyin' Dutchman's on the reef...
...Harvard Independent, a new student weekly paper, is in danger of foundering on a political reef even before it's launching day. Three members of the original nine founders of the paper resigned their positions last week and a fourth is reportedly considering leaving before the first issue appears on October...
Lately its appetite has become 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...
Baffling Phenomenon. Acanthaster's ravages not only occur quickly but are long-lasting. After stretching itself over the coral, the crown-of-thorns quickly digests the simple organisms that constitute the tough outer layer of the reef. Structurally weakened, the remaining skeletons are easily eroded by the ocean's waves. Once the coral barriers are breached, the islands that they surround are no longer protected from the pounding of the open sea. Because the reefs are vital to the spawning and feeding of much undersea life, the process can also destroy fertile fishing grounds almost overnight...
...Burkholder, 66, who is now at the University of Puerto Rico and works in a laboratory at Mayagüez, also serves as senior marine scientist for Lederle Laboratories. Some of his antibacterial finds have come from sponges collected from as far away as Australia's Great Barrier Reef and Palau in the Caroline Islands. When he arrived in Rhode Island last 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...