Photo by Pascal van de Vendel
Beneath the turquoise waters off the northern coast of Jamaica — the same stretch used as a backdrop for scenes in the James Bond film No Time to Die — a team of divers is carrying out an unusual mission. Rather than coral fragments or chemical treatments, their equipment consists of waterproof speakers, which they are installing on the seafloor in an attempt to pull a dying reef back from the brink.
The project, reported by the Guardian this week, is led not by a scientist but by Marco Barotti, an Italian artist who five years ago began creating sculptures based on 3D scans of coral. His work brought him into contact with emerging research suggesting that sound could be a key tool in reef recovery.
The logic of acoustic enrichment
A healthy coral reef is far from silent. It is, as the Guardian describes it, a biological symphony — snapping shrimp, grunting fish, shifting currents. A dying reef, by contrast, goes quiet. Fish and tiny coral organisms rely on sound to navigate the open ocean and find a home, so the reasoning behind the project is straightforward: restore the soundscape, and the marine life may follow.
“Sound has always been at the core of my work but never at this level,” Barotti told the Guardian. “If a reef is alive with sound it’s most likely to stay alive right? And repopulate. And when reefs degrade they grow silent.”
The project uses underwater speakers, described in the piece as “boomboxes”, that play recordings of a healthy reef for 14 hours a day, powered by solar panels on the surface.
The approach draws on peer-reviewed science. A study published in Nature found that playing healthy reef sounds at degraded sites on the Great Barrier Reef doubled the total fish population within six weeks, while species diversity increased by 50% – a critical factor for long-term reef resilience.
The scale of the crisis
The urgency behind these efforts reflects the severity of what reefs are facing. Reefs cover just 1% of the ocean floor but support 25% of all marine life, and since 1950 approximately half of the world’s coral reefs have been lost to overfishing, pollution and the climate crisis.
The immediate driver of recent losses is ocean warming. As fossil fuel emissions trap heat in the atmosphere, the ocean has been forced to absorb around 90% of that excess energy, triggering marine heatwaves that cause corals to expel the algae living in their tissues – a process known as bleaching that leaves them white, starved and vulnerable to disease. A record marine heatwave in 2023 turned Caribbean waters into what the Guardian describes as a “hot tub”, causing widespread bleaching across the region.
Lee-Ann Rando, a second-generation scuba diving instructor who captured footage of bleached reefs that year, said: “It’s getting quieter. It’s really sad to say that I’ve seen the degradation a lot in the past 10 years. You just feel hopeless. You feel like, ‘Am I ever gonna see this again?'”
Science, art and hope
The acoustic project is designed to complement the work of the local Alligator Head Foundation, where researcher Bethany Dean is growing coral fragments in the lab and experimenting with assisted breeding, acting, in her own words, as a “coral matchmaker” to help organisms reproduce in conditions where natural reproduction is increasingly failing. Lab-grown coral fragments are then attached to Barotti’s underwater sculptures, creating what the project hopes will become the physical and acoustic infrastructure of a recovering reef.
Dexter Dean Colquhoun, the foundation’s head of research, said the acoustic approach “fits right into what we’re trying to do, which is to restore the reefs using as many methods as possible.”
Rando, for her part, is choosing optimism. “You gotta stay hopeful right?” she said. “I think there is hope. There are strands of it.”