Google Invites Public To Listen To Sounds Of Corals To Save Them

Bright and beautiful coral reefs are a stunning work of nature that, unfortunately, is dying out at an alarming rate due to overfishing, climate change, declining water quality, and coastal development. All of which are working towards stripping the seas of such a marvelous ecosystem.

If you’ve ever felt moved to try and help save them but don’t know where to begin, Google has now come up with a new solution where the public can all chip in and protect the coral reefs just by listening to them.
 
The Calling in Our Corals program first sprung up as a Google Arts & Culture experiment that has now been opened to the public. The crux of the project is to get the people acquainted with what the corals sound like and then help train artificially-intelligent models to know what to listen out for.
 
Google has released a video that showcases the melodies of a healthy and dying reef, allowing people to familiarize themselves with the rhythm of the ocean before participating in the conservation efforts. Once you have learned to distinguish between different marine sounds, you can use your knowledge to assist its artificial intelligent systems in coral reef conservation.

You will be presented with underwater recordings. Each time you hear a fish or some other form of life, you can tap on an onscreen button to help the machine learn what to listen for in the ocean.
 
Steve Simpson, a marine biologist working with Google on the project, notes that corals are often noisy places bustling with life. However, once overfished or if it is too unstable to sustain life, it becomes a lot quieter as marine animals take refuge elsewhere.
 
Recordings have been gathered from across 10 different locations, including Australia, the US, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, and Sweden. With so many audio files now in its catalog, training the AI models has turned into a community effort where even just three minutes of your time could significantly aid in this journey to preserve what is left of these works of nature.

The team will then use these recordings to aid them in restoring and rebuilding the habitats for sea life to return to.
 
Head over to the project website here to get started.

[via Engadget and Axios, screenshots via Google Arts & Culture]