Underwater Speakers Help Revive Dying Coral Reefs

Photo: Soft Coral Scolymia, Getty

As coral reefs die they become silent graveyards, however, the introduction of underwater loudspeakers brings new life and helps to rejuvenate the coral reefs.

A recently published paper in Nature Communications highlights research focused on the impact of playing sounds around dead or dying corals. The findings were a pleasant surprise in the future conservation and recovery of coral reefs.

The researchers weren’t playing Kesha or classical music, but the sounds of healthy vibrant coral reef ecosystems.

The researchers believed they could potentially entice juvenile and adult fish to a dying reef by playing sounds associated with a vibrant living reef. The results proved their hypothesis, broadcasting healthy reef sounds doubled the total number of fish and increased the number of fish species by 50% compared to equivalent unmodified dead coral.

To make sure there was no bias in the acoustically enriched reefs, the research team studied dead coral areas with both dummy speakers and no speakers. After 40 days the acoustically enriched reefs had double the number of fish compared to the dummy speaker and no speaker control groups. The increase in fish was spread […]

Full article: Underwater Speakers Help Revive Dying Coral Reefs, Study Finds