Ocean Soundscapes in a Changing World

The oceans are full of sound, with a vast array of intentional (e.g., communication) and incidental (e.g., feeding) sounds produced by marine mammals, fish and invertebrates, as well as an increasing contribution of noise emanating from human activities. Soundscapes influence behaviour of reef organisms at key moments in their life (e.g., selecting habitat, mate choice and courtship, avoiding predators), but habitat loss and noise pollution can disrupt behaviour with direct fitness consequences.
Ocean soundscapes offer new ways to map, monitor and restore marine ecosystems. Since most sounds on coral reefs are produced by the resident community, classifying the soundscape (e.g., phonic richness, density of sound producers) provides insight into reef health and community structure (including assessment of cryptic and nocturnal species usually missed by visual census), long-term acoustic monitoring allows us to track habitat degradation and recovery, and adding sound in degraded habitats can accelerate recovery. This is a field still in its infancy, with great opportunity for major breakthroughs in acoustic classification and attribution of biological sources of sound, biodiversity monitoring and mapping, automated acoustic analyses, restoration through acoustic enrichment, and delivery of new scientific knowledge into environmental policy, marine management, public understanding and natural history films.