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I'm Rachel Seltman. In case you missed it, we're spending this week revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the past year.

Today we're diving into the subject of coral reefs. Even if you're not an avid snorkeler or diver, chances are that movies and childhood trips to the aquarium have given you some sense of how lively these ecosystems can be.

Maybe you've even seen photos of what happens to a reef when it loses that vitality,

something that's becoming increasingly common due to bleaching events and other ecological disasters.

But do you know what a sick reef sounds like?

According to our guest for this episode, which originally aired in August

2024, a reef at its peak sounds something like this. But when a reef falls on hard times,

things can get pretty quiet. Here's our chat with conservation bioacoustics researcher Ila Keisha Davidson, who studies the changing soundscape of the sea.

So Dr. Davidson, why is it important that we listen to the sound of a coral reef?

It's quite an exciting space when you think about how far our understanding and learning has come for the ocean in general, but then coral reefs in particular, if you think about how Jacousto described the oceans as the silent world in the sort of 1950s, and we're starting to learn more and more about how actually they're hardly silent.

They're incredibly acoustically diverse.

And coral reefs are a particularly loud and diverse set of sounds that you can hear,

but also they're really interesting and important ecosystems to understand.

They don't cover a whole lot of the planet's surface, about 0.1%, but a quarter of all

marine species that we know depend on coral reefs at some stage in their life. So this is a real

hustle and bustle of life that's happening there, and it's incredibly acoustically diverse. And so you can think of all these different pops and chirps and grunts and snaps that happen there.

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