Fish Go to the Disco to Save the Coral Reefs

Charles Rotter

PBS News Hour ran a segment Monday night as part of its “Tipping Point” series. The story, filed by special correspondent Ben Tracy with Climate Central, is about how the world is going to save coral reefs from climate change.

Brace yourselves. The answer is an Italian artist with a wet suit and some speakers.

Marco Barotti, a sound artist from Italy, is currently in Jamaica installing solar-powered underwater boom boxes on the reef. The speakers, embedded in 3D sculptures based on scans of actual coral, will play recordings of healthy reef sounds for fourteen hours a day. Marine life, the theory goes, will hear the party and come check it out. PBS’s correspondent, narrating his own descent in scuba gear, explains the concept like this:

“It’s kind of like hearing the sounds of a really great party. Makes you want to go check it out.”

The reefs are saved. You may all go home.

What exactly is on the fourteen-hour loop, the segment never tells us, but the project is on the north coast of Jamaica, so one assumes a certain inevitability. Every little fish, presumably, is gonna be alright.

What Is Actually Going On

To be fair, and we will be fair before getting back to the boom box, there is real science here.

A 2019 study by Tim Gordon and colleagues at the University of Exeter, published in Nature Communications, found that playing recordings of healthy reef sounds at degraded reefs on the Great Barrier Reef did attract more juvenile fish. PBS notes, accurately, that a similar experiment saw fish populations roughly double in six weeks. Acoustic enrichment is by now a small but legitimate corner of reef restoration research. Fish do use sound to navigate. Recordings of biologically active reefs are reliably more attractive to fish than the silence of a dead one.

So far, so good.

The problem is the next step in the argument, the one that takes you from “fish come back” to “the reef is saved.” Those are not the same thing. Acoustic enrichment attracts fish to a substrate. It does not turn dead coral back into live coral. The corals are dead because the water got too hot in 2023, or because of disease, or because of pollution, or some combination of all three. The fish coming over to listen to the soundtrack do not address any of that. They are, if anything, a thin layer of biological activity on top of an otherwise ongoing problem.

You can have a perfectly noisy reef, full of fish drawn in by the underwater playlist, while the actual coral mortality continues unimpeded. The fish are not building coral. The fish are turning up to a reef-shaped speaker.

About All That “Devastation”

A word on the framing that surrounds this kind of story is also worth offering, because it gets repeated, essentially unchallenged, in every coral piece that runs on a major American broadcaster.

Reefs bleach. Reefs recover. They have been doing this for a very long time. Bleaching is a stress response: the coral expels its symbiotic algae and goes pale. If conditions improve, the algae return and the coral survives. If conditions remain severe, the coral dies. Different species recover at different rates, and whole reef systems, when not subjected to compounding local insults like pollution and overfishing, can recover dramatically and often quickly.

The poster child for the “tipping point” narrative has been the Great Barrier Reef. The poster child also keeps refusing to die.

According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), the agency that has conducted in-water monitoring of the GBR for 39 years, the reef reached record-high coral cover in 2022 across all three regions of the reef, despite five mass bleaching events since 2016. It hit near-record highs again in 2024.

The most recent AIMS annual report, released in August 2025, does document a substantial single-year decline following the 2024 bleaching event. But as the agency itself put it, the losses came “off a high base,” and current cover is back near long-term average levels. AIMS LTMP leader Dr. Mike Emslie has described the pattern as one of increasing volatility, with coral cover oscillating between record highs and lower readings. That is a different story than the one Americans are typically told. The reef is volatile. It is not, by AIMS’s own measurements, collapsing.

None of which is to say reef damage is imaginary. It isn’t. The most serious threats to most reefs, however, are local rather than planetary. Sedimentation from deforested watersheds smothers coral. Nutrient runoff from agriculture fertilizes the algae that outcompete it. Sewage outflow does both. Overfishing of herbivores like parrotfish allows the algae to take over once they get started. Southwest Florida is the familiar case: the Lake Okeechobee discharges down the Caloosahatchee, the runoff from cane fields and citrus groves, and the chronic septic-system leakage from the developed coast all combine to do measurable, ongoing damage to the reefs off Sanibel and the Keys. None of that is climate. All of it is drainage policy, land use, and sewer infrastructure. Heat stress sits on top of these local insults and amplifies them, which is why the reefs that come through bleaching events best are consistently the ones that were not already being smothered by local pollution, and the reefs that come through worst are the ones that were. These problems are durable, expensive, and politically inconvenient. None of them benefit from a soundtrack.

You will rarely see the record highs of 2022 and 2024 reported on PBS, or in the New York Times. You will see the declines. This is the observation bias that climate panic produces: every loss is documented as a milestone toward catastrophe, and every recovery is treated as a temporary reprieve before the next inevitable decline. Reefs that go up don’t make headlines. Reefs that go down do.

It is worth keeping that asymmetry in mind whenever a “tipping point” segment opens with a tearful diver and ghostly white-reef footage. The reef in question may have been at record coral cover the year before.

The PBS Framing

None of which is to say the Jamaican project itself is bad. Pairing acoustic enrichment with the work being done by the Alligator Head Foundation, which is growing and breeding coral fragments in a lab and attaching them to the sculpture-speakers as substrate, is reasonable enough as a multi-pronged effort. The Alligator Head researchers, including resident “coral matchmaker” Bethany Dean (PBS’s term, not ours), are doing serious work. The artist is providing infrastructure for it. Fine.

The problem is the framing. PBS’s “Tipping Point” series is, by design, about ways the climate is at the edge of catastrophe and what can be done to pull it back. The implication of this segment, complete with the title “How Underwater Speakers Are Helping Revive Coral Reefs Devastated by Climate Change,” is that you, the viewer, are looking at a climate solution. You are not. You are looking at an art installation paired with a fish-attractor that may or may not assist a separate coral restoration program.

That is a real thing happening in the real world, and it is fine. It is not a tipping-point reversal. It is not going to “revive” anything, not at the planetary scale, and not without addressing the actual mortality drivers. The segment never quite says it will, but the framing, with the diver in tears and the marine heatwave footage and the urgent voiceover, plainly invites you to think it might.

The Boom Box

Anyway. The boom boxes are pretty cool.

Marco Barotti, the artist, freely acknowledges he is not a scientist. He is doing what artists do, which is taking a research idea and turning it into something visual and emotional. Solar-powered sculpture-speakers shaped like coral, sitting in the Caribbean playing a fourteen-hour loop of fish and shrimp clicks, is a memorable image. The local researchers are appreciative. The dive instructor in the segment is hopeful. There is footage of fish swimming toward the speakers, which is, again, what fish do when they hear sounds that suggest food and shelter.

If a documentary about Jamaican coral restoration were billed as a documentary about Jamaican coral restoration, this would be a perfectly nice story. The issue is the elevation, by a major American broadcaster, of one creative side project into an unlikely tool to bring reefs back from the brink. Acoustic enrichment is an unlikely tool, granted. It is also, on its own, not bringing anything back from any brink.

The fish are going to the disco. The coral, meanwhile, is jammin’. It always has been.