Soundscape of protected and unprotected tropical Atlantic coastal coral reefs

Abstract

Behavioural patterns and distributions of crustaceans, fish and mammals can be inferred from acoustic recordings of the extremely noisy marine acoustic environment. In this study, we determined the soundscape of protected and non-protected marine areas between January and April 2016. Sonobuoy (a device for sound monitoring) recordings began at sunset and lasted approximately 12 hours per day. The results show a complex soundscape dominated by biological sounds produced by crustaceans and fish. Six fish chorus-dominant frequencies between 200 and 1000 Hz occurred at a similar time each day, except for chorus I. The choruses consisted of high-energy callings after the last reef line within the protected area. However, fish choruses showed low energy levels in unprotected areas. The results show the importance of protected areas for fish populations and the usefulness of passive acoustics to monitor biodiversity of sounds of commercial fish in Brazilian tropical costal reefs.

Soundscape Maps of Soniferous Fishes Observed From a Mobile Glider

“…These authors recorded disturbance calls in an aquarium, which are not similar to the pulse pattern in our unknown grunt, but disturbance call pulse rates may not be reflective of actual calling rates occurring during reproduction in the wild. Recent soundscape recordings of the fish choruses (their "Chorus I") from protected reefs in Brazil have been attributed to L. breviceps (Borie et al, 2021) and these calls appear very similar to the unknown grunt sound, based on spectral analyses of the two choruses. The reproductive biology of the banded drum was described by Ross (1984) at a site very close to where we recorded the unknown grunt chorus, near Cape Lookout, NC.…”

“…Fish chorusing in the ocean soundscape has been gaining a great deal of attention because of their loud vocalizations. Several recent papers have noted the large contribution of fishes to the ocean soundscape (Locascio and Mann, 2008;Bertucci et al, 2021;Borie et al, 2021;Vieira et al, 2021). One of the first papers published about soundscapes with fish choruses was based on recordings made in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Lookout, North Carolina (United States) in the summer of 1943 during World War II (Dobrin, 1947).…”

“…They can be recorded, and their species identity determined; in some cases, their behavior can be associated with specific sounds (Fish and Mowbray, 1970;Mok and Gilmore, 1983;Luczkovich et al, 1999aLuczkovich et al, ,b, 2011Sprague and Luczkovich, 2001;Rountree et al, 2006). Choruses (McWilliam et al, 2017(McWilliam et al, , 2018Borie et al, 2021;Duarte et al, 2021) and individual calls of many fishes including red drum, Sciaenops ocellatus (Lowerre- Barbieri et al, 2008;Montie et al, 2016); weakfish, Cynoscion regalis (Connaughton and Taylor, 2011); spotted sea trout Cynoscion nebulosus (Luczkovich et al, 1999a;Montie et al, 2017); striped cuskeels, Ophidion marginatum (Sprague and Luczkovich, 2001); sea robins Prionotus sp. (Fish and Mowbray, 1970;Connaughton, 2004); and oyster toadfish Opsanus tau (Gray and Winn, 1961;Fine and Lenhardt, 1983) are well described with sonotypes used for comparison with soundscape recordings.…”