I find this post subjectively very cool. I did my PhD in a marine biology lab which had other scientists doing research on ocean “soundscapes”—which includes reducing the types of noise you talk about here, but also increasing the types of noises that are beneficial for wild animals (from a purely conservation perspective). For example, one colleague had a project where they installed underwater speakers, playing recorded reef noises, on a newly restored reef and showed that this increased the settlement of juvenile invertebrates onto the reef. This sort of work wasn’t the focus of this article, but it might have implications for the welfare of wild juvenile invertebrates and does seem pretty tractable. This wasn’t the focus of my own work (which was in a different area in marine policy) but happy to chat further over DM if anybody reading this article is feeling inspired.
I find this post subjectively very cool. I did my PhD in a marine biology lab which had other scientists doing research on ocean “soundscapes”—which includes reducing the types of noise you talk about here, but also increasing the types of noises that are beneficial for wild animals (from a purely conservation perspective). For example, one colleague had a project where they installed underwater speakers, playing recorded reef noises, on a newly restored reef and showed that this increased the settlement of juvenile invertebrates onto the reef. This sort of work wasn’t the focus of this article, but it might have implications for the welfare of wild juvenile invertebrates and does seem pretty tractable. This wasn’t the focus of my own work (which was in a different area in marine policy) but happy to chat further over DM if anybody reading this article is feeling inspired.