According to the literature, an outbreak situation is when populations of COTs reach abundance greater than 140 individuals per hectare. In some areas, such as the Great Barrier Reef, abundances have exceeded 1,000 individuals per hectare. But this criterion for outbreaks does not consider the coral coverage or health of the reef. For a healthy reef with 80-90% hard coral coverage 100 indiv./Ha may be sustainable, but for a depleted reef with only 6% coral coverage this may be considered far too many. We first calculated the total average abundance of COTS from all the data, and found it to be 6.6 indiv./Ha, which is low, but still enough to cause a lot of coral mortality.