It's drizzled on fish and chips and used for cleaning, but simple household vinegar could soon be called on for its most important mission yet: saving the Great Barrier Reef.
Researchers at Queensland's James Cook University have described in a new paper the effectiveness of vinegar in killing crown-of-thorns starfish.
Outbreaks of the venomous, coral-eating animals are considered one of the most significant threats posed to the Great Barrier Reef.
The paper's lead author Lisa Bostrom-Einarsson said vinegar had been used to try to kill the starfish before, but JCU scientists had refined the process, resulting in a 100 per cent kill rate.
Bostrom-Einarsson said divers currently used 10ml-12ml of ox bile to kill each individual crown-of-thorns starfish.