Submitted by whatatwit t3_xwk78i in UpliftingNews
This is an audio from the BBC called the Life Scientific where Physicist Jim Al-Khalili interviews other scientists about their life
> Tim Lamont is a young scientist making waves. Arriving on the Great Barrier Reef after a mass bleaching event, Tim saw his research plans disappear and was personally devastated by the destruction. But from that event he discovered a novel way to restore coral reefs. Playing the sounds of a healthy coral reef entices fish in to recolonise the wrecked reefs. Tim's emotional journey forced him to realise that environmental scientists can no longer just observe. They need to find new prisms with which to view the world and to intervene to save or protect the natural environment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cp9f (podcast, mp3, stream or app from the BBC)
You can listen to the recorded fish sounds here
> From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and foghorns to laughs, a cacophony of bizarre fish songs have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has returned rapidly to health.
> Many of the noises had never been recorded before and the fish making these calls remain mysterious, despite the use of underwater speakers to try to “talk” to some.
This is the scientific paper on using the recorded fish sounds to improve reef restoration success (open)
> ...Here, using a six-week field experiment, we demonstrate that playback of healthy reef sound can increase fish settlement and retention to degraded habitat. We compare fish community development on acoustically enriched coral-rubble patch reefs with acoustically unmanipulated controls. Acoustic enrichment enhances fish community development across all major trophic guilds, with a doubling in overall abundance and 50% greater species richness. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13186-2
Ha ha! Good reef!
They will be back quickly, and in greater number
With some help.
The clawback decade will be interesting.
But how does moving back early impact the species that are now living in the area?
If you listen to the audio Tim answers a similar question about does it encourage predators.
Catfishing fish...
When they start a coral restoration project there often is no coral reef there anymore and so they use coral-rubble or something they call a reef star (also sometimes other recycled metal objects) and so there is no fish ecosystem at that location. Like any other ecosystem, as some fish move in some will be predators and others will be prey in a food chain starting with fish that eat plants and so on and then fish that eat fish. The whole point of an ecosystem is that this forms a more or less stable system over time.
Reef Star: https://buildingcoral.com
Other than that, the scientific paper I linked to is open and writtem in fairly clear language.
> Surveys of fish communities
> The family Pomacentridae (damselfish) was surveyed regularly throughout reef deployment. The high abundance of damselfishes on coral reefs (up to 50% of reef fish communities18) facilitates adequate statistical power to test for differences in community development, and their non-cryptic nature allows accurate surveying with minimal disturbance. Visual surveys by a SCUBA diver (T.A.C.G.) were used to monitor communities of juvenile damselfishes (those that had settled on reefs following a pelagic larval phase in the current season). The observer and dive buddy remained at least 1 m from the reef during surveys, in order to minimise disturbance to the community. Each reef was surveyed 10 times throughout a 40-day period that started immediately following construction, with 3–9 days between consecutive surveys. The start of the survey period on each reef was staggered across a total duration of 10 days (i.e. construction and surveying of the final reef started 10 days after the first reef was built), to allow a single observer (T.A.C.G.) to complete surveys at the same experimental time point. Surveys took up to 1 h per reef; staggering was therefore necessary to allow for surveying of 33 patch reefs at the same experimental time points. Deployment order was counterbalanced such that the same number of reefs within each treatment were constructed and surveyed on each day.
> After 40 days, the whole fish community on each reef was surveyed by dismantling the reef piece-by-piece. An observer using SCUBA (T.A.C.G.) checked each piece of rubble thoroughly, using dilute clove oil and a hand net to capture all juvenile fishes on the reef. The dive buddy kept a continuous watch for ‘stray’ fishes that attempted to escape across the sand flat or burrow into the sand during the survey process. All reefs were double-checked for missed fishes after surveys were completed; to our knowledge, no fishes were missed from surveys. All fishes were identified to species, except in cases where uncertainty meant that identification was only possible to family or sub-family level. In these cases, fishes that looked similar were assigned as the same species (e.g. ‘Unknown goby 1'); this was the case for 4% of species, whose members together constituted 9% of the total abundance. Adult fishes were excluded from analyses, as their larger home ranges mean that they do not exhibit fixed associations with reef habitat to the same extent as juveniles40. After the experiment, all fish were released alive onto neighbouring reefs.
You could email Tim if you have more questions.
Wow i literally heard this today in a podcast
That's pretty fantastic! I hope its used more in the world!
Did you enjoy it? Yes, it's available as a podcast, and as a live stream, a 'listen again' stream, and can be downloaded as an MP3 file. Some people like the BBC's mobile app called Sounds, too.
It was in the Freakonomics podcast
That's interesting. I didn't know they did that.
It was about noise and they used this as an example of a positive
That makes sense. I thought for a minute that they just wrappered the whole thing.
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