Coral reefs, which cover only 0.1% of the ocean’s surface, host a staggering 25% of all known marine species. These vibrant underwater ecosystems are facing significant threats from overfishing, disease, coastal construction, and heatwaves. It’s crucial to ramp up efforts to monitor, manage, protect, and restore these vital habitats.
Emerging research shows that ecoacoustics—the natural sounds that characterize an ecosystem—can provide valuable insights into reef health. Over the past year, a project called “Calling in Our Corals,” in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, invited people worldwide to listen to reef audio recordings, helping to build a bioacoustic data library on reef health.
Now, a new AI-powered tool called SurfPerch, developed with Google Research and DeepMind, is taking things up a notch. SurfPerch can automatically process thousands of hours of reef audio, offering a new way to understand coral reef ecosystems.
Why Listening to Coral Reefs Matters
Listening to the diversity and patterns of animal behavior on reefs allows researchers to hear reef health from the inside, track nighttime activity, and survey deep or murky waters. However, manually analyzing countless hours of underwater sounds is a daunting task that scientists can’t keep up with. The “Calling in Our Corals” project has brought together marine biologists, creatives, programmers, and citizen scientists to monitor reef health, assess biodiversity, identify new behaviors, and measure restoration success.

From a Listening Collective to a Trained AI Model
Last year, participants in “Calling in Our Corals” listened to over 400 hours of reef audio from sites around the world, clicking whenever they heard a fish sound. This collective effort generated data that would have taken bioacousticians months to analyze. These results have been used to fine-tune SurfPerch, an AI model that can now quickly be trained to detect any new reef sound using just a few examples. This innovation allows for the analysis of new datasets more efficiently, removing the need for expensive GPU processors and opening new opportunities to understand and conserve reef communities.
From Lab Experiment to Real-World Insights
The first trial combining “Calling in Our Corals” with SurfPerch has already revealed differences between protected and unprotected reefs in the Philippines, restoration outcomes in Indonesia, and relationships with fish communities on the Great Barrier Reef.
And the best part? Anyone can still help by listening to brand-new audio on “Calling in Our Corals” to further train the model. To learn more about the work supporting reef restoration, visit Building Coral. Together, it’s possible to make a difference in protecting these precious underwater worlds.