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Autonomous robosub hunts starfish with poison-tipped needles
Crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) are voracious coral consumers with a propensity for population explosions, which makes them very real threats to the world's coral reefs. And while they're typically held in check by fish higher in the food chain, overly aggressive human fishing has decimated these predator species. That's why a team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia has spent the past decade developing a fully autonomous COTS-hunting robotic submarine to help bring these populations back into balance.
