A healthy reef is alive with music, but the chorus fades as the coral dies.
Take it from me: there’s a lot of music under the sea. A healthy section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, is full of it—damselfish hooting, clownfish chirping, shrimp clicking their claws. ”There’s this whole sort of orchestra of animals making noise,” says University of Exeter PhD candidate Tim Gordon. But when reefs get damaged, animals die and the orchestra stops playing. That silence makes it harder for young fish that have grown up in the open ocean to find a way back to their adult homes, further degrading the already-suffering reefs.