Calling the corals home
Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 11:00AM Ed Yong at Discover Blogs has a great post up about a PLoS One paper describing how coral larvae find their way back to the reef from the plankton, using sound. This is a remarkable ability for a tiny ciliated ball of cells, demonstrated through a nifty experiment where the scientists played sound from different directions into a dish of tubes containing coral larvae and showed that they moved towards the speaker playing sounds from a reef.
Putting aside the remarkable little larvae, maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Anyone who has ever put their head underwater on a reef, especially a Pacific reef, can tell you they are noisy places. I always thought it sounded like frying bacon - a sizzling crackle of clicks, pops, scrapes and cracks, courtesy of snapping shrimps, parrotfish and a myriad other beasts. The first time I heard that sound I remember being startled, and then amazed. Serene underwater scenes? Serene, my butt!
Reader Comments (2)
Funnily enough I am sitting with my friend who has come to visit me from NZ. His PhD in NZ showed that larval fish are attracted to temperate reefs using underwater sound.
I guess what surprised me was that coral larvae don't show much sign of being able to hear. I mean, fish have ears and swim bladders and such, whereas a planula just looks like a ciliated blob. I wonder how the detect the sound?