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Listen to the fish sing: scientists record ‘mind-blowing’ noises of 
restored coral reef
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Damian Carrington 
8 December, 2021
From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and 
foghorns to laughs, a mix of bizarre fish songs 
have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has 
returned quickly to health.
Many of the noises had never been recorded 
before and no one knows which fish are making 
these sounds.
The reef had been badly damaged by blast 
fishing, which uses explosives. The corals are 
now being restored, but the scientists wanted 
to know if the creatures that live in the reefs 
were also returning.
Visual surveys miss camouflaged animals 
and those that come out only at night, so the 
researchers listened to the sounds of the reef. 
The sounds were similar to those of reefs that 
had never been damaged.
Sound is vital for reef survival because almost 
everything that lives there, from corals to 
crustaceans to fish, produce offspring that 
spend the early part of their lives in the open 
oceans, before returning to the reef using the 
sounds to guide them.
Tim Lamont, at the University of Exeter, UK, 
the main author of the study, said: “Working 
on underwater sound on coral reefs has 
often been quite miserable. We’ve been 
listening to reefs going into silence as their 
condition gets worse. But this was exciting and 
inspiring because the change was going in the 
other direction.”
“Furthermore, as we listened to the hours 
and hours of recordings, we kept discovering 
sounds we had never heard. Some were a bit 
familiar but some were just like, ‘I have no idea 
what that is.’ It was a real sense of adventure 
and discovery,” he said.
“The foghorn one really blew our minds. 
I got really enthusiastic and tried to work out 
exactly what fish was making it. I downloaded 
the noise on to an MP3 player, and got an 
underwater speaker.
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“I was swimming around playing it loudly, 
trying to ‘talk’ to the fish. I thought I got a reply 
a few times, but I never saw the fish. So the 
mystery continues.”
Professor Steve Simpson, at the University 
of Bristol, UK, who is part of the team, said: 
“Some of the sounds we recorded are really 
bizarre. We still have a lot to learn about what 
they all mean and the animals that are making 
them. But for now, it’s amazing to be able to 
hear the ecosystem come back to life.”
The world’s scientists have warned that 
global heating of 2C could cause warm-water 
corals to become extinct. As well as being a 
catastrophic loss of biodiversity, this would 
destroy the livelihoods of the hundreds of 
millions of people who rely on reefs for food, 
income and storm protection.
To restore the reefs, small pieces of live coral 
are attached to star-shaped metal frames, 
which were placed in the rubble left by the 
blast fishing.
While the creatures making the noises were 
not identified, some of the sounds are known to 
scientists. Whooping sounds have been linked 
to the Ambon damselfish, growls and grunts 
with soldierfish, and knocking sounds with 
triggerfish. But the laugh sound was new to 
science. Noises can come from fishes’
drum-like swim bladder, their throats or from 
teeth being banged together.
“ We were surprised to see the reef recover 
in such a small amount of time,” Lamont said 
but added that a complete recovery would 
take longer, to allow rarer slow-growing corals 
to return.
“If we don’t address the wider problems to 
the world’s reefs [such as the climate crisis 
and water pollution], conditions for reefs will 
get more and more hostile, and eventually 
restoration will become impossible.”
© Guardian News and Media 2021 
First published in The Guardian, 08/12/2021
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