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STARFISH BASH

Interested in a rendezvous with a creature that regurgitates its stomach, surrounds its food with digestive juices and then draws the lot back down its gullet? Fancy a diving partner with sharp, toxic spines that break off and get under your skin? Like to fondle a beast that spawns up to 60 million eggs in one season? Then this could be the tour for you.

 

 

 

Survey....
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It’s not a new Hollywood blockbuster or your worst nightmare, but a cantankerous sea critter that is currently going ballistic in the Togian Islands, off the coast of central Sulawesi in Indonesia. The Crown of Thorns Starfish (or COTS - known locally as the bintang), is familiar to most Australians, who watched it gorge itself on the Great Barrier Reef a decade or more ago. These brutes can devour 50 square centimetres of coral polyps every day - not much, but when there’s millions of them … Their current population explosion is threatening the unique (because they lie at the intersection of Australasian and Asian) reefs of the Togians.

A group of local people from the village of Katupat have set up the Toloka Foundation, with the basic aim of conserving the local environment and educating others to do the same, before unsympathetic tourism kicks off and the Togians become another Kuta Beach.
Besides raising awareness to the environmentally damaging live fish trade going on around the reefs, developing sustainable small scale trade, planning for a small scuba diving school, and working to prevent illegal trade in protected species, Toloka is organising Bintang Tours. US$30 will fund one, which will remove approximately 1000 COTS. US$100 will buy a Velpar Spot Gun, the most effective way of delivering a fatal dry acid injection to the starfish (let’s face it, if your number’s up your number’s up, and fatal dry acid is one way to go).

If you’re interested in eyeballing the COTS on their home territory, get in touch with the Toloka Foundation or contact Mandi and Pete Feehan in the UK on tel: 44 (0) 1666-577096. You can actually join a tour and go diving, and the Toloka Foundation are keen for you to help in person. Or you can even spare yourself the confrontation, fatal acid, toxic spines and starfish deaths on the reef by just sending money.

 

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