Are You Listening?

"At the moment of giving birth, each reef sings its own lullaby to its young.   Each night, the reef sings into the sea, guiding its young back home."  

Spring reflection on the water.  The red circle is jellyfish as is the white blob.

This text above sounds like a poem.  It sounds like the lyrics to a song.  It is an actual fact from studying the bioacoustics of the Australian Great Barrier Reef.  Tim Gordon's Doctoral research using underwater speakers and collecting samples in both coral reef areas and open areas discovered that the tiny coral larvae after weeks afloat in the ocean are able to find their way back to their coral reef.

I am in the process of reading The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker.  It is a book about the unsuspected depth and breadth of nature's sounds.  Thus far I have read about the whales in a study that has verified they carry information from many generations in their songs.  The Innuit knew this, but the white man didn't believe them until extensive studies on whale sounds verified it.  Whale sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear can travel across the ocean.

The book also describes studies done on freshwater turtles in the Amazon that prove they make sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear These sounds are made even before the hatching that helps siblings survive by making noises so that they all hatch close to each other.

Most of these studies were done by scientists with determination (many women of course) but also men who searched hard and long for funding and support.

I may continue to enlighten those of you who would not be interested in reading such a long book in future posts, perhaps.

Such information makes me realize the interconnectedness of this planet and sad that I will not be around to find out more about how we all came to be.  We are an amazing complicated biome that came from an explosion billions of years ago.