关键词:
Science
Humanities and Social Sciences
multidisciplinary
摘要:
TWO international meetings devoted entirely to echinoderm biology have taken place this year : in March, the Third International Echinoderm Conference was held at the Australian Museum, Sydney, and in July a meeting was organised principally for European workers at Bedford College, *** both meetings this year, the proportion of papers offered on the various groups of echinoderms was remarkably similar: notably, about a quarter at each were devoted to starfishes, and a tenth to palaeontological aspects. A major difference in the coverage was that at Sydney about a quarter of the papers were taxonomic, reflecting perhaps the present concentration on this type of work in the Australasian area, while in London only a single paper (by an Australian) was *** would have been all too easy for the Sydney meeting to have been dominated by papers on the coral-devouring Crown-of-Thorns Starfish, but the convener, F. W. E. Rowe (Australian Museum), wisely rationed this subject to three papers. One of these referred to the possible cyclic occurrence of population explosions in this starfish. Elderly fishermen have said that they recall abnormally large numbers of Acanthaster being present on the Great Barrier Reef at about the turn of the century, and E. Frankel (University of Sydney) has examined cores taken from the reef talus in several areas to see if he can identify abnormally high concentrations of the disarticulated skeletal ossicles of this starfish among the broken coral and other material through the cores. He has assumed that the relative occurrence of these ossicles at the various levels in the cores might reflect the relative abundance of the starfish at the time the debris was being abraided from the reef. So far, Frankel has gone back 900 years, and, while not yet recording evidence of a plague 70 or 80 years ago (at the turn of the century), he has recorded higher-than-normal incidences of remains of Acanthaster at 110, 185 and 450 years *** conv