Healthy coral reefs have rich soundscapes, full of the croaks, purrs, and grunts of various fishes and the crackling of snapping shrimp. Larval coral uses these sounds as cues to identify the best places to settle and grow. The authors found that sound could potentially be a vital tool in the effort to restore coral reefs.
Broadcasting the sounds of a healthy reef to a reef that is degraded encourages coral larvae to settle there. This indicates that it's possible that 'acoustic enrichment' can be a key intervention to support imperiled reefs.
"What we're showing is that you can actively induce coral settlement by playing sounds," said Nadège Aoki, a doctoral candidate at WHOI and first author on the paper."You can go to a reef that is degraded in some way and add in the sounds of biological activity from a healthy reef, potentially helping this really important step in the coral life cycle."
When they collected the cups, the researchers found that significantly more coral larvae had settled in the cups at Salt Pond than the other two reefs. On average, coral larvae settled at rates 1.7 times higher with the enriched sound environment. The highest settlement rates were at five meters from the speakers, but even the cups placed 30 meters away had more larvae settling to the bottom than at Cocoloba and Tektite.
"We seem to have lost some of the complexity of Tektite's soundscape over the last decade," Aoki said."It could be that conditions there are not as good as we thought they were, but we don't know for sure." "Replicating an acoustic environment is actually quite easy compared to replicating the reef chemical and microbial cues which also play a role in where corals choose to settle," said Amy Apprill, a microbial ecologist at WHOI and a co-author on the paper."It appears to be one of the most scalable tools that can be applied to rebuild reefs, so we're really excited about that potential.
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