Nikkei reported on an effort to ferment starfish — long treated as a nuisance in the ocean and culled and discarded in huge numbers — into a repellent whose overpowering stench keeps farm pests away. It’s a clever twist: turning waste starfish into a deterrent. On 5ch’s Science News+ board, the discussion mixed worry that the powerful smell might bother neighbors with hope that it could work against bears and wild boar. The thread expanded to cover starfish and sea urchin trivia, as well as opinions that seafood should be put to more use as fertilizer.
If they spread this near my place, I'd die (from the smell)
3AnonymousSep 1, 2026 22:54
Seems like it'd mess with the crops too
4AnonymousSep 1, 2026 22:58
Hoping this works on bears
6AnonymousSep 1, 2026 23:16
Won't it make the crops smell too?
7AnonymousSep 1, 2026 23:34
Back in the day we fermented poop in cesspits for fertilizer — now we ferment starfish for stench-powered pest control? Fermentation really runs deep
8AnonymousSep 2, 2026 00:21
Wild boar think 'the stinkier, the better,' so they might actually come rub themselves on it
9AnonymousSep 2, 2026 00:23
So starfish get around by spinning through the air like shuriken, huh (sarcastic jab about how they'd even reach the farms)
10AnonymousSep 2, 2026 00:42
Starfish numbers are dropping from rising sea temps too — bet nobody factored that in
11AnonymousSep 2, 2026 01:00
Hey, did you know sea urchins are starfish eggs? Each of those little pop-pop bits grows into one, and they're spiky so fish won't eat them (fake trivia, not true)
12AnonymousSep 2, 2026 07:36
Re: #1
Yoshida Fisheries' Super-Stench Power vs. S.T. Chemical's Deodorizing Power (a parody matchup — 消臭力/"Deodorizing Power" is a real air-freshener brand)
FIGHT!!
14AnonymousSep 2, 2026 11:18
Won't the neighbors complain?
15AnonymousSep 2, 2026 11:34
In the countryside, 'nearby' covers a distance city folk can't even imagine, so it's fine
16AnonymousSep 2, 2026 11:49
✦ Starfish smell like sulfur compounds such as hydrogen sulfide mixed with ammonia,
17AnonymousSep 2, 2026 11:51
Seafood waste should be used more as land fertilizer — desalting and drying it is a hassle, but the payoff is worth it. Especially important for Japan, which has to import basically all its phosphorus.
Maybe it's because chocolate is a fermented food too — foreign chocolate bars, like American ones, sometimes smell faintly like poop when you unwrap them lol. That was a whole thing online a while back
Background and key points of discussion
In Japanese coastal waters, starfish have long been culled in large numbers as “pests” that damage fixed fishing nets and aquaculture farms, then disposed of as industrial waste. The idea of fermenting them into a strong-smelling repellent aims to tackle waste reuse and wildlife damage at the same time. Opinion in the thread split between concern that the powerful odor could cause friction with neighbors, and skepticism about real-world effectiveness, since animals like wild boar reportedly get drawn to strong smells rather than repelled by them. Neither point can be verified from the article alone, and no actual field-test data from farms was presented. The suggestion that “seafood should be used more as fertilizer” reflects the fact that Japan relies almost entirely on imports for phosphate rock, though the thread didn’t address the cost challenges involved.
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