"They scraped all the oysters from the sea floor so there was no hard substrate left for them to regenerate on." "The reefs were destroyed by dredge fishing," says McAfee. In 2015, McAfee and his colleagues began restoring oyster reefs off the coast of Australia using underwater speakers they made themselves to encourage wild oyster larvae back to the area to settle on the newly restored habitat.Ĭenturies of over-harvesting, habitat degradation and disease have pushed the global oyster population to the brink of extinction – with at least 85% of reefs lost in the past 150 years. "When you work on a shoestring, you have to think creatively," says Dominic McAfee, a marine ecologist from the University of Adelaide in Australia. Scientists have successfully used "acoustic lures" to guide species – including bats, fish and whales – to or away from specific locations. There is now a growing interest in the use of sound to accelerate habitat restoration itself, by coaxing certain species to certain locations using their very own sounds. In a 2020 paper, for example, researchers described how they played recordings of rainfall to trigger breeding in frogs. More recently, though, scientists have begun to investigate ways sound can be used to actively elicit certain behaviours in animals. Technology can listen where humans cannot. Acoustic sensors are small, affordable and non-invasive – and can allow researchers to capture phenomena or species which would otherwise be difficult to observe, such as species that live in forest canopies or the deep sea, or are at times inaccessible due extreme weather. Sound has long been used to observe the natural world, and advances in technology are now making passive acoustic monitoring increasingly accessible. "In the natural world, it's used in mating displays, in territorial disputes, as alarm signals."įor humans trying to support nature, meanwhile, sound can be used to identify new species, monitor populations and assess the health of ecosystems, she says. "Sound is so important," says Cheryl Tipp, curator of wildlife and environmental sound at the British Library. From microscopic larvae lost at sea to birds that travel hundreds of miles from home, conservationists are now starting to use the sounds of nature to guide them back to where they belong. But what if tapping into these sounds could allow us to not only to learn more about the natural world, but actually help to begin healing it? An emerging appreciation for the biological importance of sound has led to new strategies for environmental conservation.
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