Researchers have discovered playing the ambient sounds of healthy coral reefs underwater helps encourage vital reef-building coral, suggesting a promising path for repairing weakening reefs around the globe.
Like people who find silence disturbing and depressing, the study suggests coral need active sounds to stimulate healthy activity. Scientists conducted the potentially game-changing experiments in the U.S. Virgin Islands in July 2022 by using underwater speakers to play typical healthy coral reef sounds. These sounds include the natural movement of local fauna, fish mating calls, and the scraping sounds of sea creatures feeding.
The researchers reported their findings in the October 2024 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters.
Healthy coral reefs are tremendously important because they offer natural protection to our coastlines, are vital drivers of our economy, and can be both a source of food and promising new medicines. They also provide incredible benefits to our ecosystem by helping to regulate damaging carbon dioxide in the ocean while supplying critical nutrients to other marine life, such as fish, snails, and crabs.
What was particularly interesting to the authors of the study was that the positive results decreased with distance from the speaker, suggesting that the sounds were the sole reason the reefs began growing again.
"This gives us a new tool in the toolbox for potentially rebuilding a reef," Aran Mooney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said in a statement on the organization's website.
"It cannot be understated that particle acceleration, not sound pressure, is the essential acoustic variable of interest for studies of marine invertebrate acoustic responses," according to the researchers.
Playing ambient sounds is only the latest outside-the-box effort scientists have employed in their conservation efforts. For example, several organizations recently teamed up to introduce parasitic wasps to Nightingale Island in a successful attempt to save endangered buntings that call the island home.
While the results of these sound experiments do offer hope, the researchers themselves sound cautiously optimistic.
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"Acoustic enrichment methods, while promising, are in their infancy and effective applications will require considerable additional research," they wrote in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters.
They also stressed that it is unlikely that sound alone can restore coral reefs to complete health. "No single tool is sufficient to address the range of stressors and environments in which practitioners are seeking to support coral reefs."
But early results are promising that we might have found yet another effective tool in combating the changes in the seas brought on by the overheating planet.
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