'Spooning poo': how five Eiffel Towers' worth of sea cucumber poo helps sustain a Queensland reef

Researchers use drones to map 30,000 sq metres of Heron Island at high resolution so sea cucumbers can be counted

In the wee hours of the morning ... we weren't too excited to be spooning poo," reef ecologist Dr Vincent Raulot says.

But that's exactly what he and a team of researchers did to calculate out how much poop was excreted by an estimated 3 million sea cucumbers on the 20 sq km Heron Island coral reef in Queensland.