Climate change is an undeniable phenomenon that includes changes such as sea-level rise, sea temperature rise, and the destruction of ecosystems around the planet. Although Earth’s climate has changed cyclically over the years, these cycles have occurred every few hundred thousand years, if not every few millions of years. The current climate change cycle is being rapidly accelerated by things humans do, such as using fossil fuels to power consumer vehicles, which has proved detrimental to organisms around the world en masse.

One effect of climate change is that coral reefs have readily been destroyed around the world. Both the reefs and the sea life is known to frequent such areas have faced major population declines in recent years. Not only are such reefs beautiful, as they’re also known to be important staples to healthy marine ecosystems the world over. As such, scientists have done their best to research coral reefs and document new attempts to bring them back, though much of these efforts haven’t yielded fruit.


A study that was recently published by Nature Communications, a trusted scientific journal, found that blasting sounds loudly underwater was directly tied to drawing more fish and other aquatic life to their regular habitats in coral reefs, even if those coral reefs were largely or entirely dead. Bringing such sea life back to damaged coral reefs is believed to potentially help them recover and grow back to normal.

Several marine scientists hailing from Australia and the United States employed underwater speakers that replicated sounds naturally put out by healthy coral reefs to bring marine life back to now-damaged reefs. Known as “acoustic enrichment,” according to the scientists’ study, the process consisted of attaching loudspeakers to bodies of coral in the Great Barrier Reef, found in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Northwestern Australia.

Noises that regularly take place in coral reefs, even though they might not be apparent to humans, are made by shrimp, fish, and other aquatic life. These scientists attempted to recreate these noises and play them via such loudspeakers, rather than music that humans find popular, such as pop music, rock, hip-hop, or rap.

The Great Barrier Reef has been ravaged by increased water temperatures in recent years through a process known as “bleaching.” Two major bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 seriously damaged the Great Barrier Reef, with several other occurrences taking place over the past two decades or so.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/02/world/speakers-dead-coral-reef-fish-scn/index.html