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<\/p>\nThis El Ni\u00f1o is set to be the largest on record by a \u2018mind-blowing margin\u2019<\/p>\n
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The hope is that these sea songs will lure floating coral larvae into settling on the degraded reefs and help them to recover. This project, run by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, relies on the discovery that coral larvae can sense sound and use it as a cue to follow as they search for a permanent home1<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cHealthy reefs are naturally broadcasting sound all over the place,\u201d says Aran Mooney, a marine bioacoustician at WHOI who leads the project. He\u2019s part of a small army of researchers stepping up their efforts to save threatened corals. In addition to playing lullabies to restore damaged reefs, they are implementing other emergency measures, such as moving corals from shallow locations to deeper, cooler water and inoculating reefs with protective microorganisms.<\/p>\n The planet\u2019s corals need all the help that they can get. This year\u2019s record-breaking ocean temperatures<\/a>, resulting from human-caused climate change and a super-strong El Ni\u00f1o brewing in the Pacific Ocean<\/a>, have spurred fresh alarm about the future of coral reefs. Elevated water temperatures can cause coral bleaching, which happens when the usually richly coloured organisms expel the symbiotic algae that they rely on for nutrients; this can ultimately kill the coral.<\/p>\n Researchers test a system in Dominica that plays sounds of a healthy reef to help corals grow.Credit: Dan Mele, \u00a9Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution<\/p>\n As of late August, coral bleaching had been observed in corals around Florida, the Pacific coast of Panama and Kiribati in the Central Pacific. The Coral Reef Watch of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that, in large swathes of the oceans, the water had reached temperatures that placed corals at risk of bleaching and heat mortality<\/a>. Temperatures are expected to rise even further in 2027 as the El Ni\u00f1o reaches its full strength, and that will raise the risks for corals.<\/p>\n Coral reefs can recover from bleaching and their ability to bounce back has often surprised scientists. But recovery takes time and corals can\u2019t catch a break: this year\u2019s bleaching event comes less than a year after the last global one ended in 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s sort of like having COVID, also getting the flu, and at the same time being stressed about your job,\u201d says Amy Apprill, a marine geochemist who leads WHOI\u2019s coral-restoration team. She says that the accumulated stress is likely to make the heat this year and in 2027 even more harmful for corals than previous events.<\/p>\n Michael Sweet, a coral biologist at the University of Derby, UK, says that, despite the depressing outlook, many researchers are focusing on what they can do to help. \u201cYou swing between almost giving up, to going, \u2018I\u2019m going to fight to my dying breath to try and make things a bit better\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Lost reefs<\/p>\n The twenty-first century has not been kind to coral reefs. Four times since 1998, hot oceans \u2014 fuelled by global warming and boosted by El Ni\u00f1o events \u2014 have caused corals to bleach worldwide. Those bleaching events have taken a toll. According to a major report by hundreds of scientists published in August2<\/a>, overall hard coral cover between 2020 and 2024 was 9.5% lower than between 1980 and 2009. Much of the decline occurred during the record heat in 2024, which caused bleaching at nearly all of the world\u2019s reefs, and saw hard coral cover fall by 8.9% compared with 2023, the largest single-year drop so far (see \u2018Rough times for reefs\u2019).<\/p>\n Source: Ref. 2<\/p>\n \u201cWhat that decline tells us is that the recovery is never enough before that decline happens again,\u201d says report co-author Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez-Rivero, a coral researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Cape Cleveland.<\/p>\n Projections beyond this year\u2019s El Ni\u00f1o event also look bleak. \u201cEven under the optimistic models for the future ocean temperature, we expect massive bleaching everywhere\u201d over the next decade, says Giovanni Strona, an ecologist who studies corals at the European Commission\u2019s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy.<\/p>\n \u201cBy the end of the century, many projections predict almost complete annihilation of coral reefs worldwide,\u201d adds Strona. A 2025 study he co-authored argued that, barring massive increases in funding or some major technological advance, the scale of the problem is now too great for restoration efforts to prevent huge declines3<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ocean temperatures set to break all-time record: what\u2019s next?<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Coral scientists are unequivocal that the priority for protecting corals must be slashing greenhouse-gas emissions and protecting reefs from local stresses such as overfishing and pollution. Climate models suggest that limiting global warming to 1.5\u2009\u00b0C relative to the pre-industrial average would spare some coral reefs from repeat bleaching events4<\/a>. But in a 2\u2009\u00b0C warmer world, nearly all reefs would be subjected to severe bleaching regularly \u2014 eventually leading to the corals\u2019 death.<\/p>\n Scientists working on coral restoration insist that much can still be saved. \u201cCoral reefs have not crossed a point of no return,\u201d states the report2<\/a>. However, as the world looks set to overshoot both those temperature thresholds<\/a>, researchers say that the heat is increasingly challenging reefs\u2019 natural recovery capacity and that more-direct interventions are necessary to keep coral reefs alive.<\/p>\n \u201cIt flips between being an amazing time to be a coral scientist and a biologist in general and having the opportunity to develop and establish these really cool techniques, against the fact that we have to do it\u201d because corals are in trouble, says Sweet, who studies ways to use the coral microbiome to help reefs.<\/p>\n That work includes a growing set of techniques that show promise for helping corals, although difficulties scaling them up and a lack of funding remain persistent issues. Some approaches are relatively low-tech. Long-standing coral-gardening projects, for example, are getting better at breeding corals with improved tolerance to heat and acidity5<\/a>. Other approaches range from treating corals with microbial cocktails and micronutrients to luring larvae using underwater sounds of a healthy reef.<\/p>\n Coral lullabies<\/p>\n For Mooney, the fact that coral larvae \u2014 invertebrates less than one millimetre long \u2014 could be sensitive to sound came as a big surprise. In 2012, he and his colleagues were listening for differences in the soundscapes of healthy and degraded reefs near the US Virgin Islands. The Caribbean has seen some of the world\u2019s most-severe declines in coral cover due to rising ocean temperatures and other local pressures, such as overfishing, sediment pollution and disease outbreaks.<\/p>\n In 2012, it was well known that fish were attracted to the sounds of a vibrant reef6<\/a>. And Mooney had found that squid, too, were sensitive to sound7<\/a>, as were crabs8<\/a>. It occurred to him that other invertebrates, such as corals and oysters, might also use sonic cues to assess a reef\u2019s state.<\/p>\n Mooney and his colleagues began conducting experiments to learn more about how corals might use sound. They found that the larvae were sensitive to sonic cues and settled more often when exposed to the ambient sounds of healthy reefs9<\/a>.<\/p>\n Amy Apprill surveys biodiversity at a coral reef near the US Virgin Islands.Credit: Dan Mele, \u00a9Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution<\/p>\n Then, in 2022, they began testing whether reef soundscapes might be harnessed to help these ecosystems recover by broadcasting recordings of a vibrant reef in places where the reef had gone silent. The team placed coral larvae of the mustard-yellow stony coral Porites astreoides at degraded reefs in special cups that vibrated to let in sound, but that blocked other sensory information, such as light and chemical cues. The researchers then used underwater speakers to broadcast audio recordings of a healthy reef. They found that larvae exposed to the healthy-reef recordings settled almost twice as often, on average, as did the ones without the sound treatment10<\/a>. \u201cOh wow. This actually worked,\u201d says Mooney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s peak spawning time for coral in the Caribbean Sea and there\u2019s something new in the water this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[556,32428,59,4230,4231,59070,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-788372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-climate-change","tag-conservation-biology","tag-gb","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-ocean-sciences","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Scientists](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/d41586-026-02965-9_53758252.jpg\"\/)
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