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Researchers have found that playing the sounds of happy corals through underwater speakers could allow degrading coral reefs to regain lost vitality.
While environmentalists are hard at work to repopulate reefs, they remain in a precarious state.
Coral larvae use ocean currents to swim around freely, but once they find a place to settle, they become permanently fixed to any given spot. Now, these new results speak for themselves. The team found that larvae were anywhere from 1.7 to seven times more likely to settle at the reef where the soundscape was being "enriched." Settlement rates also decreased depending on the distance from the speaker, supporting the working hypothesis.
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