Crown-of-Thorns Starfish

The Eilat marine reserve provides one of the few places in the world where crown-of-thorns population dynamics are studied in a protected context — outbreaks here are monitored and occasionally managed rather than simply documented from a distance. These corallivorous starfish feed by everting their stomach over coral heads and digesting tissue externally, leaving characteristic white skeletal patches that can be tracked weekly to measure consumption rates. Long-term data from the reserve shows boom-bust cycles roughly every 7-10 years, with reef recovery intervals providing insight into Red Sea coral resilience that informs management decisions region-wide.