The crown of thorns starfish and feral pig problem have a lot in common

Both are considered pests, and both have eradication programs, but it would seem that's where the similarities end.

At last week's National Feral Pig conference in Cairns, Managing Director of the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre Sheridan Morris was invited to speak about what stakeholders in the feral pig problem could learn from the team leading the charge in controlling the crown of thorns starfish problem on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).

Ms Morris said that to get on top of the starfish problem all interested stakeholders had to start working together in one large program, rather than smaller fragmented programs.

"At the time there was fragmented disjointed bits of action, marine tourism was doing bits and pieces everywhere," Ms Morris said.

"The government flipped a little bit of money to some of the tourism operators to do a little bit of work controlling crown of thorns.

"But there was nothing strategic, nothing overarching and no fundamental framework."

Ms Morris said that in around 2016, she started to look at the fact that none of these things existed.

"If you're going to do control, you have to actually set up a framework," she said.

"So we took the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) framework from agriculture, and we applied it to marine ecology.

"I also pulled together all the players who were involved and it was truly like herding cats, and they were highly resistant, and the meetings were messy."

Ms Morris said one of the most important parts of tacking the crown of thorn problem was developing a surveillance program.

"We realised we could increase the efficacy of the program just through effective surveillance by 100 per cent," she said.

"The data has shown that we can control crown of thorns to a point where the predation is less than the growth of the corals so we can get coral accretion, we can get coral recruitment and we can control the crown of thorns on the GBR."

As an outsider looking in at the feral pig problem Ms Morris said she can see where eradicators are going wrong.

"At the moment, they're still doing body counts," she said.

"Wherever we see a pig, we kill it, body counts don't matter."

Ms Morris said it's not about how many you kill, but where you kill them.

"It's about how you protect your prioritised ecological agricultural areas," she said.

"In crown of thorns, it's about the dispersal network around currents, you hammer the reef systems that are the source reefs.

"Much of the spawn from corals come from the source reefs and they are distributed downstream to other reefs."

Ms Morris said that the fundamentals of controlling the crown of thorns and feral pigs was the same.

"It's the same pattern through all the ecological frameworks, you find the source agendas and you do your major control there, you're really severe in those areas and you put less effort into other areas, because if your resources are finite, it's how you use those resources to maximise your return," she said.

"You also need good data, you need a forensic understanding of the life-cycle, so you actually hit the most vulnerable point, for example it might just be the pregnant sows.

"Taking pigs out of one area isn't really going to do anything, it's just going to create a vacuum for other pigs to move into that area."

Just as there is confusion about how many crown of thorn starfish are in Australian waters Ms Morris said the same thing was now happening with the feral pigs situation.

"The experts said there was 30,000 crown of thorns on the GBR and I think in the first couple of weeks 30,000 starfish were taken off the reef and that was only in one spot," she said.

"It's data that you need, high-quality, high-resolution data that tells you where the populations are and a big part of that is really good quality surveillance."

Feral pigs are also having a major impact on other animals in the ecosystem, as pigs are easy prey for large saltwater crocodiles.

"Crocodiles are an emerging issue in northern Queensland, pigs are just meals on wheels for crocodiles," Ms Morris said.

"In a stretch of river, you might have been able to sustain one or two apex predators because of the resources available, but suddenly if you put pigs into that picture you might be able to sustain 12 or 13 crocs.

"The architecture of the crocodile population has fundamentally changed due to feral pigs."

Just like the pig problem, the crown of thorns starfish plague has had many obstacles, like trying to poison a species in a World Heritage Area.

"Feral pigs are an intractable problem, governments have thrown up their hands up and said it's too hard, it is hard, but it's not impossible," Ms Morris said.

"It takes enormous levels of coordination, and it takes buy in from all stakeholders into a framework and it takes a lot of discipline.

"You can't just keep operating in an uncoordinated manner, all those small projects do is shift the pigs somewhere else and when the project runs out of money, you're back with pigs.

"It's like Whack a Mole, to pull this off it will take a lot of work."

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