Healthy coral reefs are known for being a vibrant home for colorful corals and fish. Like any busy ecosystem, coral reefs have their own sounds and can be quite noisy. The sounds of the fish and crustaceans that live there, rumbling, chirping, and growling, as well as the sound of healthy coral growth, echo through the water. Larval animals may use some of this sound to determine where to take root and when to grow. Broadcasting the sounds of these healthy reefs can encourage coral larvae to recolonize degraded or damaged reefs. For more information on the survey results, please visit The study was published March 13 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
Calm down in one shot
As adults, corals become immobile. The larval stage is your only chance to move around and find your perfect habitat. They swim or drift with currents until they find suitable conditions to settle on the ocean floor. In previous research, chemical and optical clues can influence that decision, and in this new work we focused on the role that sound can have. Corals don’t have traditional ears, so they can probably sense these vibrations.
[Related: Google is inviting citizen scientists to its underwater listening room.]
“What we’re showing is that sound can actively induce coral settlement,” said study co-author and doctoral candidate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). One Nadège Aoki says: stated in a statement. “If we go to coral reefs that are degraded in some way and add in the sounds of biological activity from healthy reefs, we may be able to help with this really important step in the coral life cycle.”
coral reef soundscape
Upon closer inspection, a team of researchers found Experiments to be conducted in the U.S. Virgin Islands in June and July 2022.they collected larvae Hardy coral species named Porphyry Astreoides. It is better known as mustard hill coral because of its yellow color and rugged shape. They distributed their larvae along three reefs along the south coast of St. John Island. Among these reefs, tektites are relatively healthy. Kokoroba and salt ponds are further degraded, with fewer fish and fewer corals.
The researchers installed an underwater speaker system on a salt pond reef and placed cups containing larvae at distances of 3.2 feet, 16.2 feet, 32.8 feet, and 98.4 feet from the speaker. Then, over her three nights, they played the sounds of healthy coral reefs recorded with tektites in 2013 at Salt Pond. Similar installations were installed at Tektite and Kokoroba, but none of the recorded reef sounds were played back.
After collecting the cups, we found that the salt pond cup was colonized by significantly more coral larvae than the other two reefs.The larva settled there Average 1.7x A rich sound environment is better than a less rich sound environment. Cups about 16 feet away from the speaker had the highest larval settlement rates, but even cups about 100 feet away had more larvae settling on the bottom than cups where no sound was played.
“The fact that, all else being held constant, the amount of subsidence consistently decreases with distance from the speaker indicates that these changes are due to the added sound rather than other factors. “This is particularly important because it shows that stated in a statement. “This adds a new tool to our toolbox with the potential to rebuild coral reefs.”
One of the research team’s surprises was that there was no significant difference in colonization rates between the degraded Korova reef and the healthy tektite reef.a 2018 survey They found that tektites had higher colonization rates than cocoloba. This may be due to natural variation.but tektite reef Recently, we have seen devastating hurricanes, significant bleaching events, and even coral disease outbreaks.
“It seems like some of the complexity of the tektite soundscape has been lost over the past decade,” Aoki said. “It’s possible that the situation on the ground is not as good as we thought, but we don’t know for sure.”
Potentially new coral reef restoration tool
According to the authors, the potential decline in colonization rates in tektites shows how serious the threats facing coral reefs are and require rapid and scalable solutions. Coral reefs protect coasts from high waves and erosion, provide tourism and dining opportunities for millions of people, and Supports at least 25 percent of all marine life. By some estimates, Earth has lost half of its coral reefs in the past 30 years.
[Related: Sandy ‘Reef Stars’ help bring life back to coral reefs hurt by dynamite fishing.]
The research team hopes this study will be useful for future coral restoration efforts. Enhanced soundscapes can be used to increase establishment rates in coral nurseries or passively broadcast on coral reefs in the wild. It still requires human oversight, but restoration should be relatively easy to perform.
“Recreating the acoustic environment is actually very easy compared to recreating the chemical and microbial cues of coral reefs that play a role in where corals colonize,” study co-author and WHOI Microbe says ecologist Amy Aprile. said in a statement. “This appears to be one of the most scalable tools that can be applied to coral reef reconstruction, so we are very excited about its potential.”
