JUVENILE fish follow the crackle and fizz from a coral reef to help them find it. The “frying bacon” sound of snapping shrimps for example can be picked up 20 kilometres away.
Stephen Simpson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues set up 24 artificial reefs, each with a speaker system, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. On six consecutive nights they played recordings of natural reefs at half the sites. A reef that was noisy one night was silent the next and vice versa. Reefs with the audio cue attracted four times as many cardinal fish and nearly…
