Crown-of-thorns starfish actually four species

This video is called Crown of Thorns Starfish of Sulawesi.

From Practical Fishkeeping:

A study published in the latest issue of the journal Biology Letters has identified the crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), a species thought to be widely distributed throughout the Indo-Pacific, to consist of a species complex with as many as four species.

Catherine Vogler and coworkers used sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene from crown-of-thorns starfish samples covering its entire distribution to demonstrate that the species consists of four deeply diverged clades (from the Red Sea, Pacific Ocean, northern Indian Ocean and southern Indian Ocean respectively).

There are conservation implications to this discovery.

The outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea do not appear to be as massive and widespread as in the Pacific, suggesting that outbreak patterns might vary between the different sibling species.

Researchers have sequenced and decoded for the first time the genome of the crown-of-thorns starfish, paving the way for the biocontrol of this invasive predator responsible for the destruction of coral reefs across Indo-Pacific oceans: here.