Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have discovered that the sounds of healthy coral can be used to encourage coral larvae to settle and grow.
The study was conducted on golfball corals, and the larvae responded positively to the sounds of a healthy coral reef. This is the second coral species that has shown a positive reaction to acoustic stimulation.
According to the study’s first author and doctoral candidate at WHOI, Nadège Aoki:
“Acoustic enrichment is continuing to show promise as a technique in the field and in the lab to enhance coral settlement rates…There is a very limited pool of species that have had any kind of acoustic work done with them so far, and this is the second one where the corals have responded to replayed sound and settled…We’re getting at some of the nuances of coral biology…There’s a huge range of reproductive strategies that corals use and different species have different larval periods. We’re opening up this broad realm of questions about how responsiveness to sound will vary between species.”
While WHOI Marine biologist and senior author of the paper Aran Mooney added:
“Acoustic enrichment worked for 36 hours or so…After that, they seem desperate to settle, and healthy cues become less important…Finding a second species settling in response to sound shows that this isn’t just a one-off, and maybe we can really scale this up… But we can’t just throw a speaker over the side of a boat and think it’s going to work. We have to know the system and it has to be integrated with other conservation and restoration efforts.”
