Oyster cluster (Dominic McAfee)
Playing sea soundscapes can summon thousands of baby oysters, and help regrow oyster reefs
Dominic McAfee, Brittany Williams, Lachlan McLeod and Sean Connell, Phys.org
Imagine you're in a food court and spoilt for choice. How will you choose where to eat? It might be the look of the food, the smell, or even the chatter of satisfied customers.
Marine animals do the same thing when choosing a good place to live. Even seemingly simple creatures such as marine larvae use sight, smell and sound as navigational cues. Once we understand these cues, we can use them to help nature recover faster than it would on its own.
In new research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the authors amplified the natural sounds of the sea through underwater speakers. They were testing if sound cues would draw baby oysters to swim to the locations where they are trying to regrow oyster reefs. It worked better than the researchers had hoped. Many thousands more larvae swam to the study locations than control areas and settled on the bare rocks.
