Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Voge obamb here. The past century hasn't been kind
Speaker 1: to coral reefs. These delicate, complex, important ecosystems have been
Speaker 1: hit hard by the environmental changes brought on by the
Speaker 1: industrial and digital revolutions. The byproducts of all that industry
Speaker 1: and technology, unfortunately include pollution, ocean of cidification and warming
Speaker 1: seas due to global climate change, resulting in damaged and
Speaker 1: diseased corals and coral reef. Ecosystems perhaps obviously need healthy
Speaker 1: corals to function, but corals also need the help of
Speaker 1: other organisms, mostly hundreds of species of fish, to remain healthy.
Speaker 1: Biodiversity is key to keeping a reef system in balance,
Speaker 1: and different species have different jobs on the reef, eating algae, plankton,
Speaker 1: other fish, and random crud off the reef. A barrier reef,
Speaker 1: like the one off the eastern coast of Australia, gets
Speaker 1: its name from the fact that texts the shallow waters
Speaker 1: along the shore from the open sea, providing a safe
Speaker 1: calm habitat for all kinds of organisms. If a few
Speaker 1: of them abandon a reef due to sickly corals, a
Speaker 1: few more will decide it's intolerable, and eventually everybody will
Speaker 1: abandon ship, resulting in a dead reef. But research published
Speaker 1: in November of twenty nineteen in the journal Nature Communications
Speaker 1: finds that there might be a solution to the large
Speaker 1: scale desertion of coral reefs by fish species playing them
Speaker 1: the sweet music of a healthy reef. The studies senior
Speaker 1: author is Steve Simpson, Professor of Marine Biology and Global
Speaker 1: Change in the Department of Biosciences at the University of Exeter.
Speaker 1: He said in a press release, healthy coral reefs are
Speaker 1: remarkably noisy places. The crackle of snapping shrimp and the
Speaker 1: whoops and grunts of fish combined to form a dazzling
Speaker 1: biological soundscape. Juvenile fish home in on these sounds when
Speaker 1: they're looking for a place to settle. The research team
Speaker 1: conducted their sound experiments on recently erect portions of Australia's
Speaker 1: Great Barrier reef. They played recordings of a thriving reef
Speaker 1: through loudspeakers in the rebel of once healthy reef habitat,
Speaker 1: and found that twice as many fish were attracted to
Speaker 1: these damaged reefs as were to similarly run down habitats
Speaker 1: where speakers were set up but no sounds were played,
Speaker 1: and the fish stuck around for the entire forty days
Speaker 1: of the study, even after they figured out that the
Speaker 1: party wasn't as cool as advertised, and although attracting fish
Speaker 1: to the reef won't automatically bring it back to life
Speaker 1: and won't fix the problems it started this whole mess
Speaker 1: to begin with, Improving the reef soundscape could be a
Speaker 1: useful tool in jump starting degraded reefs. Study co author
Speaker 1: Andy Radford, a professor of behavioral ecology in the School
Speaker 1: of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, said in
Speaker 1: a press release, acoustic enrichment is a promising technique for
Speaker 1: management on a local basis. If combined with habitat restoration
Speaker 1: and other conservation measures, rebuilding fish communities in this manner
Speaker 1: might accelerate eco system recovery. However, we still need to
Speaker 1: tackle a host of other threats, including climate change, over fishing,
Speaker 1: and water pollution, in order to protect these fragile ecosystems.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Jesselin Shields and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radios. Has
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: fishy topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot
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