TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Steve Simpson: How ocean noise destroys marine ecosystems

Unscramble the Blue Letters

To be a marine biologist is a wonderful thing. I get to live in two urnesevis. When I go to bed, I don't know to which world my demras will take me. And when I'm uareedtwnr, I'm westegilhs, I can move in three dimensions. I can spend all day staring into the blue or marveling at the extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious, sometimes fearsome creatures that live in the sea. To be a human underwater is a completely different sensory experience. But it also strikes fear into me, not me as a human, but me as the fish that I senpd my life trying to understand. Because the ocean can be a place full of danger and full of seemingly impossible challenges. Let me give you the example of the purieols life cycle of a coral reef fish. So we're all faliimar with the brightly colored beautiful fish that live on coral rfees - cities of life full of color. But each year, these fish pudcroe eggs, and the eggs hatch into tiny, almost microscopic larvae, and they spend several weeks at sea developing, only the size of a grain of rice. And after about two or three wekes, they're competent, ready to rreutn to a coral reef where hopefully, once they found the right reef, they can gradually muatre and join their adult comtmiuny. Now, this seems paradoxical: you live in the perfect environment, and yet you send your offspring out to sea. Why would that be so? I've spent my life trying to udransentd some of the psseerocs that make this life cycle possible. In particular, how to fish find a reef? You're out at sea, at the mercy of ocean currents. How on earth, if you're the size of a grain of rice, do you find home? How do you choose the right place to live? How do you find a hiding place? These are the chaeenllgs that I try to tackle with some of the research that I do. Now, how would you do it? If you were this tiny fish at sea, what what information would you want to try and make that life cycle possible? Well, we know that some fish are able to smell different components of their envimneornt. Some fish are able to look at the position of the sun in the sky, even the way sunlight shines through the clouds, perhaps even use celestial nighttime visual cues. Some fish even have a magnetic sense. So is that enough information to get these fish home? Well certainly, one thing that they probably can't use is sound, right? 60 years ago, Jacques Cousteau bhugrot into the living rooms of the world, for the first time, the wonder of our underwater wlrod. He invented sucba, to be able to take cameras underwater and beam those images back to people around the world. It was a rambrkeale film in so many ways, except perhaps for the tlite. You see, Jacques Cousteau told us that the ocean was a silent world. But when we go into the ocean, we know that's not true. Without scuba, we hear wlehas singing. This is the love song of a humpback whale. And whales can communicate over tens of miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, as they ianterct with each other. When we look on a coral reef, we realize it's not just whales and dolphins miakng sound; the fish can speak too. Fish produce popping, gunnitrg, whooping, trumpeting sounds, and they do this to warn each other of predators, to be able to call each other over when they find food, and sometimes, particularly around the breeding season, to try and really impress each other. And so they have some amazing snogs within the world of fish. Here's some of the croaking sounds of sergeant majors, the whooping sound of an ambo-damselfish and the deep grunting love song, in this case of a cod. So fish use sound; it's eeaintssl to their lives. And it's not even just the fish. When we sartt looking at the invertebrates that live on the reef too, we realize that lobsters can play their antennae like a fiddler would play the voiiln, and snapping srhimp, that probably are no bigger than the size of your thumb, with a claw no bigger than the size of your thumbnail, are able to produce one of the ldoseut underwater explosions every time they open their claw and push a blbube forwards into the water which implodes with a flash of light and an enormous bang. And all together, that ceatres a cknilracg sound that gives coral reefs its soundscape. So 18 years ago, I asked a question which, at the time, almost everybody I was working with on the Great Barrier Reef thought was crazy: is it possible that fish could use sound as a way of finding their way home? Now, to ask that question, my first approach was to take lhgit traps - light traps are bright boxes with clear glass windows which have slits in them, like letter boxes - and when you snihe a bright light underwater on the edge of the reef, you can intercept the larval fish, the baby fish, as they come back to the reef. Many fish, like moths, are atrtecatd to light, and we can catch them in our traps and we can count them as they return. But just to mix it up a little bit, I then hung underneath a trap a speaker. These are underwater speakers sold for synchronized-swimming teams to be able to keep beat underwater, but we use these speakers to playback recordings of coral reefs, to ask the question, "Are fish, at this tiny early stage in their life, several weeks old, attracted to coral reef sound?" And sure enough, three months later, putting these traps out night after night, we found that we caught more than twice as many fish in our noisy traps compared to the quiet ones. And then, to test whether this really was enough for a fish to choose where it wanted to make its home, we hung the speakers over slmal piles of dead coral rubble, acrtfiiial reefs that we built on the sand flats. And sure enough, the fish came swimming in when we were pinaylg our sound. So sound is clearly a cue that these fish were using to hear their way home. So I've spent the last 15 yaers leintnisg to the ocean, trying to interpret what these fish can hear. What is it, what information is available that gives fish this sensory experience that encourages them home? Now, as a marine biologist, one of the peieiglvrs is getting to play with some very big, very eeinpvxse toys. And I'm just going to share two of mine with you today. The first is the good ship misfaa, which we invented as a way of being able to sail a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, over the reefs so that we could start to understand the rich tapestry of sound that's made as you travel from different tyeps of reef. And then the second one is my hyadsuorr. This is a - you could see at the time that funding for marine bio acoustics was in its early stages. This is an inflatable dinosaur, but I was able to strap my microphone to this and lveae it out overnight, and by doing that, we staretd to realize there were pttaners in the soundscape. At dusk, all of the nocturnal fish, the predators, emerge from their caves, and they start calling to each other as they go looking for food. So we get a dusk chorus. And then at dawn, these fish disappear back into the reef but out come all the daytime fish, and they've got to reestablish their territories, much like birds would do in a forest, and so we get a dawn chorus too. The reef is alive with noise, and that noise has patterns. And we've explored this by cimnniobg recordings with underwater surveys. And with our underwater surveys, we realize that we can hear whether there are craol there. We can hear which species live there. We realize that the fish at sea are doing much what we would do if we were moving to a new city: we'd perhaps get on the internet and do some research into different suburbs that we might want to live in. We think fish can do the same thing by listening to their environment and csnoihog where they want to live. We now know that reefs all sound different; they have signature sounds. Baby fish can select the best habitat for their kind by using snuod. And amazingly, it tnurs out so can many other aalmins on coral reefs: crabs, lobsters, clams, otsyres, even corals themselves. Here's a few places that we've worked. This is Balicasag, which is a marine pcttoreed area in the Philippines. You can see it's full of life. It's highly protected, there's no fishing, and as a result, when we listen to it, it's a wonderful soundscape. You can hear the fish communicating, you can hear the snapping shrimp. Now sadly, if we go three bays around the corner to Bilang-Bilangan, we find a more typical fipiilno reef. This is a reef that's been halviey overfished, so there are no herbivores to grzae away at the algae, which now somrthes the reef. You can even see craters from dynamite fishing, and when we listen to it ... you can just about hear it. So a tiny fish would have to pttrey much swim into this reef before it found it. The next generation are not ciomng home. We are changing the soundtrack of the ocean through overfishing and poor environmental protection. Let's go somewhere better: to the Great Barrier Reef. This is, for marine biologists, the benchmark. This is where we go to see what coral reefs once were like, what coral reefs can be like with really effective management, highly protected mniare rsveeres, long distances away from cities, from ptuliolon, and as a relsut, beautiful bisltung underwater cities full of life. You can hear the Great Barrier Reef; it's a wonderful thing. And we've studied this for 15 years to make reference to the reefs around the world. At least, we have until three years ago, when tragedy stucrk. With pufanil predictability, we saw the water temperature starting to rise. opnaoigcaerhc conditions meant the water was sntiyag in one location, and for three weeks, the Great Barrier Reef cooked. We saw the reef in fonrt of our eyes dying. And when we go back to the geart Barrier Reef now, we see in the northern part, where we do our research, 80% of it is dead. When we listen to that reef, it's 75% quieter. The spipnang shrimp have gone. The complexity, the diversity of the sound is missing; it's become an acoustic desert. And so we realize, with climate chngae, we are changing the soundtrack of the ocean. These, in some ways, are gradual changes - overfishing, poor meangnmaet, climate change - but we also realize when we take our recordings on a day-to-day baiss, we change the soundtrack of the oacen by driving motor boats around. Millions of mootr boats every day drive around coral reef environments, with engines that rattle, with propellers that cavitate, creating bubbles which screech in the wtaer as they burst. And we've realized that their sound causes stress to all of the animals that experience it. And with sterss comes poor decisions: the fish are no longer able to respond to predators, to be able to find food, to be able to court, to be able to successfully rrdceopue. This mtoaobort noise is a form of noise pollution that makes us realize we are changing the scaonturdk of the ocean. Now, if this was the end of the talk, it would be a sorry tale, but as a scientist, I asekd myself, "What is my role? Why am I trying to do the science that I'm doing? Is my duty simply to mtionor, to measure, to assess how the world is changing and to report that? Or can we take that knowledge, and can we actually turn it into patccrail solutions?" So here's the spiny crhmios, wodnfreul fish, lives on the Great Barrier Reef in muoaomgnos pairs, a male and female living together. They lay their eggs in the reef, and their eggs hacth, and unluasluy, they binrg their young through those first few weeks on the reef, they protect them, and you can see their baby fish out here, the lrvaae of the spiny chromis. Now, if we monitor how well they do near to boating channels, we ralezie that that motorboat noise means the atldus don't feed as well, they don't defend the larvae against predators in the same way, and the larvae fail to doeelvp, less larvae make it through. So, is that a real tragic sorty of how with noise pollution we're affecting reproduction? Or could it be that actually, if we turn it on its head, we realize our comparison is what happens if the boats aren't there: we see more reproduction, we see better behavior in the adults, more fndieeg, more defense against preoradts. Could we be talking here about a story of acoustic protection? If we go to the Great Barrier Reef and we play those sad ricrndgoes of the current state of the Great Barrier Reef, the fish no longer arrive in the numbers that we would hope for. If we play the recordings of the Great braerir Reef as it used to be, the fish still come. So here, are we tklinag about a story of the loss of a ssrneoy cue that's essential to close the loop of the life cycle? Or could this be a story about the potential value of acoustic enrichment? This is something that my group now are actively pursuing around the world, and we're hugely etecixd that there are tools with acoustics that we're realizing might be part of the solution. So we realize it's our gift to change the soundtrack of the ocean in this generation, but to change it for the better, not the worse. With technology, we can improve the sound outputs of boat engines - modern enignes are far quieter. With environmental protection, we can keep boats away from breeding grounds, from nursery grounds. We can give quiet nghits to allow the fish to come in and settle. And with acoustic enrichment, we can potentially alcteaerce the revorcey of habitats that have been worst hit. Thank you for listening. (Applause)

Open Cloze

To be a marine biologist is a wonderful thing. I get to live in two _________. When I go to bed, I don't know to which world my ______ will take me. And when I'm __________, I'm __________, I can move in three dimensions. I can spend all day staring into the blue or marveling at the extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious, sometimes fearsome creatures that live in the sea. To be a human underwater is a completely different sensory experience. But it also strikes fear into me, not me as a human, but me as the fish that I _____ my life trying to understand. Because the ocean can be a place full of danger and full of seemingly impossible challenges. Let me give you the example of the ________ life cycle of a coral reef fish. So we're all ________ with the brightly colored beautiful fish that live on coral _____ - cities of life full of color. But each year, these fish _______ eggs, and the eggs hatch into tiny, almost microscopic larvae, and they spend several weeks at sea developing, only the size of a grain of rice. And after about two or three _____, they're competent, ready to ______ to a coral reef where hopefully, once they found the right reef, they can gradually ______ and join their adult _________. Now, this seems paradoxical: you live in the perfect environment, and yet you send your offspring out to sea. Why would that be so? I've spent my life trying to __________ some of the _________ that make this life cycle possible. In particular, how to fish find a reef? You're out at sea, at the mercy of ocean currents. How on earth, if you're the size of a grain of rice, do you find home? How do you choose the right place to live? How do you find a hiding place? These are the __________ that I try to tackle with some of the research that I do. Now, how would you do it? If you were this tiny fish at sea, what what information would you want to try and make that life cycle possible? Well, we know that some fish are able to smell different components of their ___________. Some fish are able to look at the position of the sun in the sky, even the way sunlight shines through the clouds, perhaps even use celestial nighttime visual cues. Some fish even have a magnetic sense. So is that enough information to get these fish home? Well certainly, one thing that they probably can't use is sound, right? 60 years ago, Jacques Cousteau _______ into the living rooms of the world, for the first time, the wonder of our underwater _____. He invented _____, to be able to take cameras underwater and beam those images back to people around the world. It was a __________ film in so many ways, except perhaps for the _____. You see, Jacques Cousteau told us that the ocean was a silent world. But when we go into the ocean, we know that's not true. Without scuba, we hear ______ singing. This is the love song of a humpback whale. And whales can communicate over tens of miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, as they ________ with each other. When we look on a coral reef, we realize it's not just whales and dolphins ______ sound; the fish can speak too. Fish produce popping, ________, whooping, trumpeting sounds, and they do this to warn each other of predators, to be able to call each other over when they find food, and sometimes, particularly around the breeding season, to try and really impress each other. And so they have some amazing _____ within the world of fish. Here's some of the croaking sounds of sergeant majors, the whooping sound of an ambo-damselfish and the deep grunting love song, in this case of a cod. So fish use sound; it's _________ to their lives. And it's not even just the fish. When we _____ looking at the invertebrates that live on the reef too, we realize that lobsters can play their antennae like a fiddler would play the ______, and snapping ______, that probably are no bigger than the size of your thumb, with a claw no bigger than the size of your thumbnail, are able to produce one of the _______ underwater explosions every time they open their claw and push a ______ forwards into the water which implodes with a flash of light and an enormous bang. And all together, that _______ a _________ sound that gives coral reefs its soundscape. So 18 years ago, I asked a question which, at the time, almost everybody I was working with on the Great Barrier Reef thought was crazy: is it possible that fish could use sound as a way of finding their way home? Now, to ask that question, my first approach was to take _____ traps - light traps are bright boxes with clear glass windows which have slits in them, like letter boxes - and when you _____ a bright light underwater on the edge of the reef, you can intercept the larval fish, the baby fish, as they come back to the reef. Many fish, like moths, are _________ to light, and we can catch them in our traps and we can count them as they return. But just to mix it up a little bit, I then hung underneath a trap a speaker. These are underwater speakers sold for synchronized-swimming teams to be able to keep beat underwater, but we use these speakers to playback recordings of coral reefs, to ask the question, "Are fish, at this tiny early stage in their life, several weeks old, attracted to coral reef sound?" And sure enough, three months later, putting these traps out night after night, we found that we caught more than twice as many fish in our noisy traps compared to the quiet ones. And then, to test whether this really was enough for a fish to choose where it wanted to make its home, we hung the speakers over _____ piles of dead coral rubble, __________ reefs that we built on the sand flats. And sure enough, the fish came swimming in when we were _______ our sound. So sound is clearly a cue that these fish were using to hear their way home. So I've spent the last 15 _____ _________ to the ocean, trying to interpret what these fish can hear. What is it, what information is available that gives fish this sensory experience that encourages them home? Now, as a marine biologist, one of the __________ is getting to play with some very big, very _________ toys. And I'm just going to share two of mine with you today. The first is the good ship ______, which we invented as a way of being able to sail a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, over the reefs so that we could start to understand the rich tapestry of sound that's made as you travel from different _____ of reef. And then the second one is my _________. This is a - you could see at the time that funding for marine bio acoustics was in its early stages. This is an inflatable dinosaur, but I was able to strap my microphone to this and _____ it out overnight, and by doing that, we _______ to realize there were ________ in the soundscape. At dusk, all of the nocturnal fish, the predators, emerge from their caves, and they start calling to each other as they go looking for food. So we get a dusk chorus. And then at dawn, these fish disappear back into the reef but out come all the daytime fish, and they've got to reestablish their territories, much like birds would do in a forest, and so we get a dawn chorus too. The reef is alive with noise, and that noise has patterns. And we've explored this by _________ recordings with underwater surveys. And with our underwater surveys, we realize that we can hear whether there are _____ there. We can hear which species live there. We realize that the fish at sea are doing much what we would do if we were moving to a new city: we'd perhaps get on the internet and do some research into different suburbs that we might want to live in. We think fish can do the same thing by listening to their environment and ________ where they want to live. We now know that reefs all sound different; they have signature sounds. Baby fish can select the best habitat for their kind by using _____. And amazingly, it _____ out so can many other _______ on coral reefs: crabs, lobsters, clams, _______, even corals themselves. Here's a few places that we've worked. This is Balicasag, which is a marine _________ area in the Philippines. You can see it's full of life. It's highly protected, there's no fishing, and as a result, when we listen to it, it's a wonderful soundscape. You can hear the fish communicating, you can hear the snapping shrimp. Now sadly, if we go three bays around the corner to Bilang-Bilangan, we find a more typical ________ reef. This is a reef that's been _______ overfished, so there are no herbivores to _____ away at the algae, which now ________ the reef. You can even see craters from dynamite fishing, and when we listen to it ... you can just about hear it. So a tiny fish would have to ______ much swim into this reef before it found it. The next generation are not ______ home. We are changing the soundtrack of the ocean through overfishing and poor environmental protection. Let's go somewhere better: to the Great Barrier Reef. This is, for marine biologists, the benchmark. This is where we go to see what coral reefs once were like, what coral reefs can be like with really effective management, highly protected ______ ________, long distances away from cities, from _________, and as a ______, beautiful ________ underwater cities full of life. You can hear the Great Barrier Reef; it's a wonderful thing. And we've studied this for 15 years to make reference to the reefs around the world. At least, we have until three years ago, when tragedy ______. With _______ predictability, we saw the water temperature starting to rise. _____________ conditions meant the water was _______ in one location, and for three weeks, the Great Barrier Reef cooked. We saw the reef in _____ of our eyes dying. And when we go back to the _____ Barrier Reef now, we see in the northern part, where we do our research, 80% of it is dead. When we listen to that reef, it's 75% quieter. The ________ shrimp have gone. The complexity, the diversity of the sound is missing; it's become an acoustic desert. And so we realize, with climate ______, we are changing the soundtrack of the ocean. These, in some ways, are gradual changes - overfishing, poor __________, climate change - but we also realize when we take our recordings on a day-to-day _____, we change the soundtrack of the _____ by driving motor boats around. Millions of _____ boats every day drive around coral reef environments, with engines that rattle, with propellers that cavitate, creating bubbles which screech in the _____ as they burst. And we've realized that their sound causes stress to all of the animals that experience it. And with ______ comes poor decisions: the fish are no longer able to respond to predators, to be able to find food, to be able to court, to be able to successfully _________. This _________ noise is a form of noise pollution that makes us realize we are changing the __________ of the ocean. Now, if this was the end of the talk, it would be a sorry tale, but as a scientist, I _____ myself, "What is my role? Why am I trying to do the science that I'm doing? Is my duty simply to _______, to measure, to assess how the world is changing and to report that? Or can we take that knowledge, and can we actually turn it into _________ solutions?" So here's the spiny _______, _________ fish, lives on the Great Barrier Reef in __________ pairs, a male and female living together. They lay their eggs in the reef, and their eggs _____, and _________, they _____ their young through those first few weeks on the reef, they protect them, and you can see their baby fish out here, the ______ of the spiny chromis. Now, if we monitor how well they do near to boating channels, we _______ that that motorboat noise means the ______ don't feed as well, they don't defend the larvae against predators in the same way, and the larvae fail to _______, less larvae make it through. So, is that a real tragic _____ of how with noise pollution we're affecting reproduction? Or could it be that actually, if we turn it on its head, we realize our comparison is what happens if the boats aren't there: we see more reproduction, we see better behavior in the adults, more _______, more defense against _________. Could we be talking here about a story of acoustic protection? If we go to the Great Barrier Reef and we play those sad __________ of the current state of the Great Barrier Reef, the fish no longer arrive in the numbers that we would hope for. If we play the recordings of the Great _______ Reef as it used to be, the fish still come. So here, are we _______ about a story of the loss of a _______ cue that's essential to close the loop of the life cycle? Or could this be a story about the potential value of acoustic enrichment? This is something that my group now are actively pursuing around the world, and we're hugely _______ that there are tools with acoustics that we're realizing might be part of the solution. So we realize it's our gift to change the soundtrack of the ocean in this generation, but to change it for the better, not the worse. With technology, we can improve the sound outputs of boat engines - modern _______ are far quieter. With environmental protection, we can keep boats away from breeding grounds, from nursery grounds. We can give quiet ______ to allow the fish to come in and settle. And with acoustic enrichment, we can potentially __________ the ________ of habitats that have been worst hit. Thank you for listening. (Applause)

Solution

reserves
years
reefs
familiar
barrier
shine
monitor
front
nights
understand
filipino
monogamous
whales
water
talking
smothers
develop
light
weightless
environment
challenges
violin
mature
songs
underwater
practical
masifa
hydrosaur
small
heavily
soundtrack
shrimp
basis
predators
engines
making
protected
brought
expensive
coral
processes
weeks
result
accelerate
ocean
animals
motor
creates
oysters
realize
marine
change
sound
unusually
started
combining
reproduce
types
excited
scuba
feeding
listening
adults
oceanographic
title
wonderful
grunting
patterns
privileges
world
story
start
universes
dreams
perilous
struck
graze
turns
leave
bustling
recovery
artificial
pretty
recordings
interact
essential
stress
playing
bring
produce
hatch
loudest
asked
crackling
staying
attracted
choosing
bubble
chromis
coming
painful
snapping
motorboat
sensory
great
community
larvae
management
remarkable
spend
return
pollution

Original Text

To be a marine biologist is a wonderful thing. I get to live in two universes. When I go to bed, I don't know to which world my dreams will take me. And when I'm underwater, I'm weightless, I can move in three dimensions. I can spend all day staring into the blue or marveling at the extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious, sometimes fearsome creatures that live in the sea. To be a human underwater is a completely different sensory experience. But it also strikes fear into me, not me as a human, but me as the fish that I spend my life trying to understand. Because the ocean can be a place full of danger and full of seemingly impossible challenges. Let me give you the example of the perilous life cycle of a coral reef fish. So we're all familiar with the brightly colored beautiful fish that live on coral reefs - cities of life full of color. But each year, these fish produce eggs, and the eggs hatch into tiny, almost microscopic larvae, and they spend several weeks at sea developing, only the size of a grain of rice. And after about two or three weeks, they're competent, ready to return to a coral reef where hopefully, once they found the right reef, they can gradually mature and join their adult community. Now, this seems paradoxical: you live in the perfect environment, and yet you send your offspring out to sea. Why would that be so? I've spent my life trying to understand some of the processes that make this life cycle possible. In particular, how to fish find a reef? You're out at sea, at the mercy of ocean currents. How on earth, if you're the size of a grain of rice, do you find home? How do you choose the right place to live? How do you find a hiding place? These are the challenges that I try to tackle with some of the research that I do. Now, how would you do it? If you were this tiny fish at sea, what what information would you want to try and make that life cycle possible? Well, we know that some fish are able to smell different components of their environment. Some fish are able to look at the position of the sun in the sky, even the way sunlight shines through the clouds, perhaps even use celestial nighttime visual cues. Some fish even have a magnetic sense. So is that enough information to get these fish home? Well certainly, one thing that they probably can't use is sound, right? 60 years ago, Jacques Cousteau brought into the living rooms of the world, for the first time, the wonder of our underwater world. He invented scuba, to be able to take cameras underwater and beam those images back to people around the world. It was a remarkable film in so many ways, except perhaps for the title. You see, Jacques Cousteau told us that the ocean was a silent world. But when we go into the ocean, we know that's not true. Without scuba, we hear whales singing. This is the love song of a humpback whale. And whales can communicate over tens of miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, as they interact with each other. When we look on a coral reef, we realize it's not just whales and dolphins making sound; the fish can speak too. Fish produce popping, grunting, whooping, trumpeting sounds, and they do this to warn each other of predators, to be able to call each other over when they find food, and sometimes, particularly around the breeding season, to try and really impress each other. And so they have some amazing songs within the world of fish. Here's some of the croaking sounds of sergeant majors, the whooping sound of an ambo-damselfish and the deep grunting love song, in this case of a cod. So fish use sound; it's essential to their lives. And it's not even just the fish. When we start looking at the invertebrates that live on the reef too, we realize that lobsters can play their antennae like a fiddler would play the violin, and snapping shrimp, that probably are no bigger than the size of your thumb, with a claw no bigger than the size of your thumbnail, are able to produce one of the loudest underwater explosions every time they open their claw and push a bubble forwards into the water which implodes with a flash of light and an enormous bang. And all together, that creates a crackling sound that gives coral reefs its soundscape. So 18 years ago, I asked a question which, at the time, almost everybody I was working with on the Great Barrier Reef thought was crazy: is it possible that fish could use sound as a way of finding their way home? Now, to ask that question, my first approach was to take light traps - light traps are bright boxes with clear glass windows which have slits in them, like letter boxes - and when you shine a bright light underwater on the edge of the reef, you can intercept the larval fish, the baby fish, as they come back to the reef. Many fish, like moths, are attracted to light, and we can catch them in our traps and we can count them as they return. But just to mix it up a little bit, I then hung underneath a trap a speaker. These are underwater speakers sold for synchronized-swimming teams to be able to keep beat underwater, but we use these speakers to playback recordings of coral reefs, to ask the question, "Are fish, at this tiny early stage in their life, several weeks old, attracted to coral reef sound?" And sure enough, three months later, putting these traps out night after night, we found that we caught more than twice as many fish in our noisy traps compared to the quiet ones. And then, to test whether this really was enough for a fish to choose where it wanted to make its home, we hung the speakers over small piles of dead coral rubble, artificial reefs that we built on the sand flats. And sure enough, the fish came swimming in when we were playing our sound. So sound is clearly a cue that these fish were using to hear their way home. So I've spent the last 15 years listening to the ocean, trying to interpret what these fish can hear. What is it, what information is available that gives fish this sensory experience that encourages them home? Now, as a marine biologist, one of the privileges is getting to play with some very big, very expensive toys. And I'm just going to share two of mine with you today. The first is the good ship Masifa, which we invented as a way of being able to sail a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, over the reefs so that we could start to understand the rich tapestry of sound that's made as you travel from different types of reef. And then the second one is my hydrosaur. This is a - you could see at the time that funding for marine bio acoustics was in its early stages. This is an inflatable dinosaur, but I was able to strap my microphone to this and leave it out overnight, and by doing that, we started to realize there were patterns in the soundscape. At dusk, all of the nocturnal fish, the predators, emerge from their caves, and they start calling to each other as they go looking for food. So we get a dusk chorus. And then at dawn, these fish disappear back into the reef but out come all the daytime fish, and they've got to reestablish their territories, much like birds would do in a forest, and so we get a dawn chorus too. The reef is alive with noise, and that noise has patterns. And we've explored this by combining recordings with underwater surveys. And with our underwater surveys, we realize that we can hear whether there are coral there. We can hear which species live there. We realize that the fish at sea are doing much what we would do if we were moving to a new city: we'd perhaps get on the internet and do some research into different suburbs that we might want to live in. We think fish can do the same thing by listening to their environment and choosing where they want to live. We now know that reefs all sound different; they have signature sounds. Baby fish can select the best habitat for their kind by using sound. And amazingly, it turns out so can many other animals on coral reefs: crabs, lobsters, clams, oysters, even corals themselves. Here's a few places that we've worked. This is Balicasag, which is a marine protected area in the Philippines. You can see it's full of life. It's highly protected, there's no fishing, and as a result, when we listen to it, it's a wonderful soundscape. You can hear the fish communicating, you can hear the snapping shrimp. Now sadly, if we go three bays around the corner to Bilang-Bilangan, we find a more typical Filipino reef. This is a reef that's been heavily overfished, so there are no herbivores to graze away at the algae, which now smothers the reef. You can even see craters from dynamite fishing, and when we listen to it ... you can just about hear it. So a tiny fish would have to pretty much swim into this reef before it found it. The next generation are not coming home. We are changing the soundtrack of the ocean through overfishing and poor environmental protection. Let's go somewhere better: to the Great Barrier Reef. This is, for marine biologists, the benchmark. This is where we go to see what coral reefs once were like, what coral reefs can be like with really effective management, highly protected marine reserves, long distances away from cities, from pollution, and as a result, beautiful bustling underwater cities full of life. You can hear the Great Barrier Reef; it's a wonderful thing. And we've studied this for 15 years to make reference to the reefs around the world. At least, we have until three years ago, when tragedy struck. With painful predictability, we saw the water temperature starting to rise. Oceanographic conditions meant the water was staying in one location, and for three weeks, the Great Barrier Reef cooked. We saw the reef in front of our eyes dying. And when we go back to the Great Barrier Reef now, we see in the northern part, where we do our research, 80% of it is dead. When we listen to that reef, it's 75% quieter. The snapping shrimp have gone. The complexity, the diversity of the sound is missing; it's become an acoustic desert. And so we realize, with climate change, we are changing the soundtrack of the ocean. These, in some ways, are gradual changes - overfishing, poor management, climate change - but we also realize when we take our recordings on a day-to-day basis, we change the soundtrack of the ocean by driving motor boats around. Millions of motor boats every day drive around coral reef environments, with engines that rattle, with propellers that cavitate, creating bubbles which screech in the water as they burst. And we've realized that their sound causes stress to all of the animals that experience it. And with stress comes poor decisions: the fish are no longer able to respond to predators, to be able to find food, to be able to court, to be able to successfully reproduce. This motorboat noise is a form of noise pollution that makes us realize we are changing the soundtrack of the ocean. Now, if this was the end of the talk, it would be a sorry tale, but as a scientist, I asked myself, "What is my role? Why am I trying to do the science that I'm doing? Is my duty simply to monitor, to measure, to assess how the world is changing and to report that? Or can we take that knowledge, and can we actually turn it into practical solutions?" So here's the spiny chromis, wonderful fish, lives on the Great Barrier Reef in monogamous pairs, a male and female living together. They lay their eggs in the reef, and their eggs hatch, and unusually, they bring their young through those first few weeks on the reef, they protect them, and you can see their baby fish out here, the larvae of the spiny chromis. Now, if we monitor how well they do near to boating channels, we realize that that motorboat noise means the adults don't feed as well, they don't defend the larvae against predators in the same way, and the larvae fail to develop, less larvae make it through. So, is that a real tragic story of how with noise pollution we're affecting reproduction? Or could it be that actually, if we turn it on its head, we realize our comparison is what happens if the boats aren't there: we see more reproduction, we see better behavior in the adults, more feeding, more defense against predators. Could we be talking here about a story of acoustic protection? If we go to the Great Barrier Reef and we play those sad recordings of the current state of the Great Barrier Reef, the fish no longer arrive in the numbers that we would hope for. If we play the recordings of the Great Barrier Reef as it used to be, the fish still come. So here, are we talking about a story of the loss of a sensory cue that's essential to close the loop of the life cycle? Or could this be a story about the potential value of acoustic enrichment? This is something that my group now are actively pursuing around the world, and we're hugely excited that there are tools with acoustics that we're realizing might be part of the solution. So we realize it's our gift to change the soundtrack of the ocean in this generation, but to change it for the better, not the worse. With technology, we can improve the sound outputs of boat engines - modern engines are far quieter. With environmental protection, we can keep boats away from breeding grounds, from nursery grounds. We can give quiet nights to allow the fish to come in and settle. And with acoustic enrichment, we can potentially accelerate the recovery of habitats that have been worst hit. Thank you for listening. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
great barrier	9
barrier reef	7
coral reef	4
coral reefs	4
life cycle	3
sensory experience	2
fish produce	2
tiny fish	2
jacques cousteau	2
light traps	2
baby fish	2
snapping shrimp	2
motor boats	2
motorboat noise	2
noise pollution	2

ngrams of length 3

collocation	frequency
great barrier reef	7

Important Words

accelerate
acoustic
acoustics
actively
adult
adults
affecting
algae
alive
amazing
amazingly
animals
antennae
applause
approach
area
arrive
artificial
asked
assess
attracted
baby
balicasag
bang
barrier
basis
bays
beam
beat
beautiful
bed
behavior
benchmark
big
bigger
bio
biologist
biologists
birds
bit
blue
boat
boating
boats
boxes
breeding
bright
brightly
bring
brought
bubble
bubbles
built
burst
bustling
call
calling
cameras
case
catch
caught
caves
cavitate
celestial
challenges
change
changing
channels
choose
choosing
chorus
chromis
cities
clams
claw
clear
climate
close
clouds
cod
color
colored
combining
coming
communicate
communicating
community
compared
comparison
competent
completely
complexity
components
conditions
cooked
coral
corals
corner
count
court
cousteau
crabs
crackling
craters
creates
creating
creatures
croaking
cue
cues
current
currents
cycle
danger
dawn
day
daytime
dead
deep
defend
defense
desert
develop
developing
dimensions
dinosaur
disappear
distances
diversity
dolphins
dreams
drive
driving
dusk
duty
dying
dynamite
early
earth
edge
effective
eggs
emerge
encourages
engines
enormous
enrichment
environment
environmental
environments
essential
excited
expensive
experience
explored
explosions
extraordinary
eyes
fail
familiar
fear
fearsome
feed
feeding
female
fiddler
filipino
film
find
finding
fish
fishing
flash
flats
food
forest
form
forwards
front
full
funding
generation
gift
give
glass
good
gradual
gradually
grain
graze
great
grounds
group
grunting
habitat
habitats
hatch
head
hear
heavily
herbivores
hiding
highly
hit
home
hope
hugely
human
humpback
hundreds
hung
hydrophone
hydrosaur
images
implodes
impossible
impress
improve
inflatable
information
interact
intercept
internet
interpret
invented
invertebrates
jacques
join
kind
knowledge
larvae
larval
lay
leave
letter
life
light
listen
listening
live
lives
living
lobsters
location
long
longer
loop
loss
loudest
love
magnetic
majors
making
male
management
marine
marveling
masifa
mature
means
meant
measure
mercy
microphone
microscopic
miles
millions
mix
modern
monitor
monogamous
months
moths
motor
motorboat
move
moving
mysterious
night
nights
nighttime
nocturnal
noise
noisy
northern
numbers
nursery
ocean
oceanographic
offspring
open
outputs
overfished
overfishing
overnight
oysters
painful
pairs
part
patterns
people
perfect
perilous
philippines
piles
place
places
play
playback
playing
pollution
poor
popping
position
potential
potentially
practical
predators
predictability
pretty
privileges
processes
produce
propellers
protect
protected
protection
pursuing
push
putting
question
quiet
quieter
rattle
ready
real
realize
realized
realizing
recordings
recovery
reef
reefs
reestablish
reference
remarkable
report
reproduce
reproduction
research
reserves
respond
result
return
rice
rich
rise
role
rooms
rubble
sad
sadly
sail
sand
science
scientist
screech
scuba
sea
season
seemingly
select
send
sense
sensory
sergeant
settle
share
shine
shines
ship
shrimp
signature
silent
simply
singing
size
sky
slits
small
smell
smothers
snapping
sold
solution
solutions
song
songs
sound
sounds
soundscape
soundtrack
speak
speaker
speakers
species
spend
spent
spiny
stage
stages
staring
start
started
starting
state
staying
story
strap
stress
strikes
struck
studied
suburbs
successfully
sun
sunlight
surveys
swim
swimming
tackle
tale
talk
talking
tapestry
teams
technology
temperature
tens
territories
test
thought
thumb
thumbnail
time
tiny
title
today
told
tools
toys
tragedy
tragic
trap
traps
travel
true
trumpeting
turn
turns
types
typical
understand
underwater
universes
unusually
violin
visual
wanted
warn
water
ways
weeks
weightless
whale
whales
whooping
windows
wonderful
worked
working
world
worse
worst
year
years
young