RECOLLECTIONS

Micronesia and the Crown of Thorns Starfish

by Dr. Raymond McAllister
1/10/04

Truk (Chuuk)

oon it was time to head for our destination, Truk, the island where the Japanese
fleet was struck a shattering blow, during WW II, by American airpower. Most of
the fleet is still in the lagoonS, on the bottom! We traveled to Truk, landing at the
airport on the big island of Moen. We were met by a local conservation officer
named Tawn Paul. He was a Trukese native in the employ of the Marianas
government. He had some sturdy fisheries research vessels at his disposal and
for part of our time these served as mother vessels for us. We loaded our dive
gear and Zodiac chase boats and were off. The main operation was to look for the
places where the Crown of Thorns had bleached out the coral and to access the
extent of the damage. We did this by sending out two personnel in a Zodiac, one
to drive and the other to tow behind, looking for Crown of Thorns damage. My
team alternated twenty minute tows so that both parties got to do both jobs.

Rod Struck was my assistant. After counting whitened areas for a couple of
hours one morning he come aboard and said, “I’ve counted 90 sharks so far this
morning. What should I do?” I replied, “Quit counting!” Another time I rolled over
and right back into the Zodiac. Rod asked what the matter was. I said my
faceplate was not fitted right and in a few hundred feet farther down the reef I
rolled over and again right back into the boat. Rod then told me that it wasn’t my
mask at all. What was the problem? The problem was that I had jumped in almost
straddling a 7 foot shark. The second time I had figured that we had moved away
from the nice big fish and landed on its back again, both times in 10 or 12 feet of
water. It did not bother the shark but it DID bother me.

Later we went outside the lagoon along the live outer reef flat and saw great
Crown of Thorns damage there too. While doing this I got so mad that I started
beating the central disc of each Crown of Thorns to pulp with the safe end of my
bang stick. I literally beat off several inches of fiberglass doing this. It did no good
to cut one in half for each half would then regenerate a whole new starfish.
Pulping the central disc seemed like the only way to go. The rest of the team was
not too happy with me. I was wasting time and destroying a perfectly good bang
stick.

On the outside we used a 14 ft Jonboat, all aluminum. We would get a few

hundred yards off the reef and ride up and down with the huge trade wind swells. In
the trough we could not see the reef. On the crests we could almost look down on the
nearby reef.
 Much of our work was done from a 35 foot workboat, one of several in the Trust
Territories at the time, purposebuilt for the Fisheries Group. Town Paul was our
captain. He was Trukese native and a great guy. I well remember that he ate just
about anything that came from the sea. One day he asked me to dive down in the gin
clear water and bring up a large sea cucumber that was lying on the bottom. I did so
and he started carving off bite sized pieces of the critter which he called “ocean
chewing gum”. We tried it and after a few minutes the salt taste was gone and we
chewed for hours with no apparent result. The muscle was so dense and tough that
our teeth did not dent it. I put mine on one of the stringers when I hit the sack and
chewed it all the next day with no result

Another day he wet a line as soon as we stopped for the night. He soon pulled up
a doctorfish (surgeonfish or tang, too) which he held flat on his hand and started
carving pieces of flesh off for sashimi (raw fish). Bob Jones, our fearless leader,
knocked it out of Town’s hand. Town was flabbergasted. He asked why Bob had done
this and Jones explained that he had done his doctoral dissertation on this species of
doctorfish (acanthurid) in Hawaii and that it was often ciguateric there. Tosh calmed
him down and said it was never ciguateric in Truk and we could go ahead and eat it.
As you can imagine, we were slow to do so but eventually everyone but Bob ate
some raw fish.

We returned to the big island, Moen, from time to time and stayed at the hotel
there. One day Bob and I had an audience with the District Administrator, a Yankee
appointed to take care of the details of the Trust Territories. We waited for our
appointment and were ushered into the Distad’s office. We were standing about 5
feet apart exchanging small talk when there was a banging on the door. The
secretary told whoever was there that the Distad was busy but would see him as
soon as possible. The next thing we knew there was Phillipe Cousteau, who pushed
past the secretary and planted himself directly between Bob and me and the Distad.
He was not going to wait on mere mortals. I started to reach out and grab him and
Bob caught my arm and said “No, no!” It did not endear Phillipe to me.

Some time later we heard that the Cousteau team was doing movies of the
sunken Japanese fleet in the Truk Lagoon, and that they were having trouble locating
them. Well, I had conversed with an English speaking Trukese native who had
worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers after the war, sighting in the various
wrecks and plotting their positions, I suppose that we were considering using the
superb natural anchorage for a naval base. Anyhow, I was sitting in the Truk hotel
having a cool drink when the captain of the tug, that the Cousteau’s had hired, came
in with a blond lady and sat at another table. I decided to help him with locations and
went over and said, basically, “Captain, I have no use for Phillipe Cousteau, but I will
give you a lead that should enable you to quickly locate most of the sunken
Japanese warships!” Then I told him about the Truckese surveyor. Without any
wasted time on small talk, I returned to our table. Our guys asked me what I had
said, that the blonde lady was glaring at me the whole time. When I told them they
informed me that she was Phillipe’s American (I believe) wife. Foot in mouth!!!!

We saw at least one of the Jap ships between Fefan and Dublon Islands,
because the kingpost was sticking out of the water, ever 20 years after the war.
Unfortunately we were so busy tracking Acanthaster planci that we never got to
dive any of the wrecks.

There was a huge Quonset hut on Moen which was the Truk Supermarket!
Apparently they had bought out some country store in the States and brought all
the goods to Moen. I remember seeing cherry pitting machines on the shelf, up
high where they were not needed. There are no cherries on Moen! Anyway after
work on Friday they allowed the locals to buy booze and they took advantage of
it. At that time I suspected that Truk was short for truculent, because I watched,
from a safe distance, several altercations between drunken natives and Truk
police. One night it was two Trukese fighting with sharp machetes. They would
take full swings at each other and if both had not been thoroughly snokkered, one
or the other would have been dead. Finally a policeman knocked one out with his
nightstick and threw him in the back seat of the police car. As the cops got in, the
other guy grabbed a big rock and proceeded to smash the back window of the
police car to get at the guy inside. This ended when the police hit him with a
nightstick, making a sound like hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat. I thought
they must have split his skull. It was bad news to be around when they were
drinking. On the contrary, when sober they were very nice and hospitable. The
kids and many adults wore frangipani and other flowers in little headdresses
around the brow. The kids were cute. We were never in fear or concern except
around the drunks.

Continental Airlines flew 737's (I think) to Moen, where there was a runway, just
long enough for a safe landing. It was hard to believe that such a big bird could
land on that short runway, the end of which had some big rocks and beyond that,
the lagoon. It was standard practice for a bunch of natives (and sometimes the
Crown of Thorns party) to line the runway and wait for the splash as the 737 ran
off the end of the runway. It never had and did not while we were there but it sure
seemed like it should. Landing with full thrust reversal every time, whew!

We swam the lagoon from our inflatables, and at the far end of the huge, 30+
mile lagoon, we swam the islands of Udot and Tol, inside the lagoon. There were
some beautiful, as yet untouched stands of the Pacific version of Acropora
cervicornis, species unknown. We also made a short trip across the deep water to
a small atoll just off one of the passes through the barrier reef. Here we dived a
sheer wall on the pass entering the atoll. The Crown of Thorns had pretty well
destroyed all coral on this atoll and we wondered if the Lithothamnion was going
to be able to hold it together, against typhoons, until new coral grew there. We
saw blocks of coral as big as a single story house up high and dry on top of the
reef, put there by typhoon waves. At perhaps 90 feet in the pass there was a
ledge. All the divers got on the ledge and I took my Nikonos and swam out about
25 feet to get a picture of them. They were pretty funny, flattened against the reef.
When we got to the surface they told me that a big gray reef shark, a known man-
eater, had been hovering just over my shoulder while I took the picture. Good
buddies- they did not even try to warn me!

And the water was so clear and the wall so steep that a small Trukese boy
standing on the edge of the reef, was clearly visible from 90 feet. More than that,
we had given him a box of large scratch matches, old time, and he tucked it into
the front of his jockey shorts where it was also clearly visible from 90 feet.

On one of our ventures to the far reaches of Truk we went to the low sand island
of Pis-moen. It was all coral sand and only about 6 or 8 feet above sealevel. The
natives were very hospitable and invited us to sleep in one of the longhouses,
built of cane and bamboo, I'd say. The sleeping benches were raised up a couple
of feet and had nice woven mats on them. We spent several nights there. In the
morning the chief would rouse us all by blasts on a triton shell. Then he would
assign the others the necessary work for the day. The women would go foraging
on the reef flat and bring back almost anything that grew there; limpets,
anemones, sea cucumbers, various mollusks, small fish trapped in tide pools,
crabs, shrimp and so on.

My favorite was the old man who was carving a dugout canoe from a huge
breadfruit (I think) log. We talked a good bit about navigation; he was a navigator,
a proud remnant of days gone by and bemoaned the fact that his son and
grandson were not interested in learning the tricks of sailing without compass or
radar or GPS, from one island to another 300 miles away, using only the wind,
stars, wave refraction, and other natural clues to steer by. What a shame to lose
this capability, which had been amply demonstrated when a fleet of several
dugout outrigger canoes came into Pis-moen from Pulawat and Sadowal,
islands way out of sight over the horizon. Aboard was a young Peace Corps guy
who decided that the experience of sailing the old fashioned way between two
islands far apart was something he did not want to miss. When the outriggers got
close to shore he jumped over the side and raced to the beach where he knelt
down and kissed the sand. I did not point out to him that the "benjos", open toilets
on stilts, were dropping feces and urine right next to where he was kissing the
beach. He said he would never do it again, the trip, that is, because the
navigator/captain had no instruments. He would look at the stars, gaze across the
water and change course in the middle of nowhere. "Not for me", he said.

I took it upon myself to interview one of the old chiefs, Chief Paulis (note that
Paul in various forms seems to recur in the names quite frequently) about past
infestations. He said that it had occurred when he was a young man, 40-50 years
before. They had tried to get rid of the starfish by feeding them to the pigs but
they killed the pigs, so they ended up throwing them up on the land where they
dried out and died. He also informed us that if someone stepped on the thorns,
the best way to treat it was by placing a Crown of Thorns, stomach side down, on
the wound and that the starfish would suck out the poison. It does not sound too
smart but I would sure try it if I stepped on one for often native medicine works
and they have had eons to learn.

After I returned to the States I did a little research on the Crown of Thorns
infestation. By pure luck I found a novel written about pearl diving in the Central
Pacific. The novel recounted an infestation of Crown of Thorns, migrating across
the bottom of a lagoon where the native pearl diver was seeking pearl oysters. It
described starfish 12 to 18 inches across, in green, red and brown, with 16 arms,
and with poisonous spines. It was unlikely the author made it up and the book
had been published in the early 50's as I recall, making the date of the infestation
reported well before that, allowing for his having seen or heard about it and
allowing for one to three years from authorship to publishing of the novel. It may
well be that every 50 years or so we get a population explosion of Acanthaster
planci and that we were just seeing the latest one.

Everyone had their own theory why the explosion occurred. The less well thought
out were the atom tests in the Pacific, leaded gas, the World War, etc. The slightly
more reasonable was that the commercial trade in Tritonia caronis, the trumpet
shell much prized for display on a mantelpiece, had reduced the numbers of this
predator on the Crown of Thorns. I am not convinced but it is a reasonable
theory. I understand that the Australians require that you register trumpet shells
with the government and take no more from the ocean! They have a severe
infestation on the Ribbon Reefs of the Great Barrier Reef. We tried an
experiment in which we starved a trumpet for a week or more and put it in a wire
cage with a full grown Crown of Thorns starfish. It ate about half of the starfish
before being sated. Trumpets would not be any use against thousands of starfish
but might keep populations down by eating a half dozen quarter or half dollar
sized juveniles. The jury is still out on this one.