Killer starfish threaten Great Barrier Reef Crown-of-thorns starfish have a voracious appetite and waves of carnivorous starfish are eating their way through Australia's Great Barrier Reef - and sugar cane farming is being blamed. Researchers at Australia's Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), just outside Townsville, Queensland, in north-east Australia, have mapped the pattern of destruction. "Coral cover is half of what it was 27 years ago, coral cover is going down at an alarming rate." Dr Katharina Fabricius, coral reef ecologist and AIMS principal research scientist, told the BBC World Service programme Discovery. She said the biggest culprit was the Crown of Thorns Starfish (COTs). "There are three main sources for the coral decline, one is storms, however 42% is attributed to Crown of Thorns Starfish - and just 10% due to bleaching. This compares with 70% due to bleaching for reefs elsewhere in the world , such as in the Caribbean." “Crown of Thorns are very fecund animals - each female can produce between five and 20 million eggs ” John Brodie, James Cook University Bleaching occurs when corals are stressed by changes in conditions such as temperature, light, or nutrients. They expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues, causing them to turn completely white. Australian scientists are now looking at ways to reduce the destruction wreaked by starfish, which have the ability to smother coral and digest the fleshy parts.

Brazil says Amazon deforestation rose 28% in a year

Brazil says the rate of deforestation in the Amazon increased by 28% between August 2012 and last July, after years of decline. The government is working to reverse this "crime", Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said. Activists have blamed the increase in destruction on a controversial reform to Brazil's forest protection law. Last year Brazil reported the lowest rate of deforestation in the Amazon since monitoring began. The provisional statistics from August 2012 to last July suggest that the area suffering deforestation was 5,843 sq km (2,255 sq miles), compared to 4,571 sq km (1,765 sq miles) in the previous 12 months. The 28% rise interrupts a period of declining deforestation which began in 2009. However, it still remains the second lowest annual figure for forest loss in absolute terms. The worst year on record was 2004, when 27,000 sq km of forest was destroyed. Monthly data from several scientific institutions had suggested the deforestation rate might be on the rise.

The world is spending half a trillion dollars on fossil fuel subsidies every year, according to a new report. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) says rich countries are spending seven times more supporting coal, oil and gas than they are on helping poorer nations fight climate change. Fuel subsidies to US farmers amounted to $1bn in 2011 says the ODI. Some countries including Egypt, Morocco and Pakistan, have subsidies bigger than the national fiscal deficit. The new report calls on the G20 to phase out the payments by 2020. While there is no globally agreed definition of what a fossil fuel subsidy actually is, the report draws on a range of sources from the International Monetary Fund to the International Energy Agency. It details the range of financial help given to oil, coal and gas producers and consumers from national governments and through international development. What emerges is a complicated web of different types of payments in different countries. In the United States, for example, the government in 2011 gave a $1bn fuel tax exemption to farmers, $1bn for the strategic petroleum reserve and $0.5bn for oil, coal and gas research and development. Germany gave financial assistance totalling 1.9bn euro to the hard coal sector in the same year. And the UK gave tax concessions worth £280m in 2011 for oil and gas production. Pakistan is a country with the second highest number of children out of school in the world. It has some of the worst nutrition, maternal mortality and child health indicators.

Japan dolphins and other sea species 'face extinction' The EIA says that dolphins are trapped and then sold to aquaria or slaughtered for consumption Japan's hunting of dolphins, smaller whales and porpoises is threatening some species with extinction in its coastal waters, a report by a British environmental group has said. The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) report says that more than a million such creatures have been killed in Japanese hunts in the past 70 years. It says that each year thousands are killed despite conservation concerns. The Japanese government has not commented on the report. But it has consistently defended its coastal whaling as a longstanding tradition, a source of livelihood and necessary for scientific research. The government has also argued that small cetaceans should be excluded from the International Convention on Whaling. 'Grave concerns' The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo says that the Japanese practice of driving many dolphins and porpoises onto beaches to be slaughtered has drawn international condemnation. Japanese hand-harpoon hunting vessel The EIA says that porpoises, dolphins and small whales are often chased until they become exhausted and within range of hand-held harpoons. The EIA says that it is also unsustainable, and a danger to human health. Studies have found high levels of mercury and industrial chemicals like PCBs in dolphin and porpoise meat. One study found people living in one dolphin-eating community in central Japan have mercury levels five times higher than normal.

Just 227 tree species dominate Amazon

Researchers were surprised to find that such a small proportion of species dominated the Amazon . Despite being home to about 16,000 tree species, just 227 "hyperdominant" species account for half of Amazonia's total trees, a study suggests. An international team of researchers found that the region was, in total, home to an estimated 390 billion trees. Writing in Science, they added that the rarest 11,000 species made up only 0.12% of tree cover. However, they added that the new data could help unlock ecological secrets held by the biodiversity hotspot.

The results were based on a survey of 1,170 plots and half-a-million trees across the six-million-square-kilometre area, often described as the lungs of the world. The authors said that the underlying cause of the hyper dominance of the 227 species, which accounted for 1.4% of the estimated number of species in the region, remained unknown. "We knew that, normally, a few species dominate ecosystems, but if you have a system that has 16,000 tree species but just 227 make up half of the trees, that was pretty surprising even for us," said lead author Dr Hans ter Steege from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. He told the Science podcast: "We don't really know why these species are so incredibly dominant because they do not have any particular ecological feature that stands out."