The coral is listening

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-03-13 11:01

International

National Marine Sanctuaries via Wikimedia Commons

Coral larvae were drawn to settle in sites with attractive soundscapes, according to a new paper. The custom solar-powered soundscapes mimicked those of healthy reef ecosystems, and saw markedly higher rates (up to seven times) of larval settlement than quieter areas. This effect was felt outside of the immediate sound range, offering an attractive new method for encouraging coral reef growth.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

In their first days of life, coral larvae make a permanent decision of where they will settle and metamorphosize into adults. Larvae rely on physical and chemical environmental cues to make this choice. Reef sounds such as fish calls are important settlement cues for larvae. In this study, scientists used underwater speakers to enrich the sound environment of a coral reef and found that coral larvae settled at up to 7x higher rates when exposed to replayed healthy reef sounds. These results suggest that acoustic enrichment could be a new method to restore coral reefs, which are declining at alarming rates.

Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Funder: Funding for this work was provided by the Vere and Oceankind Foundations (to T.A.M. and W.G.Z.), which supported all authors, a National Science Foundation grant (OCE-2024077) to T.A.M. and an NSF graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-2141064) to N.A.

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