Calling in Our Corals

Calling in Our Corals is a compact citizen-science listening task built from real reef recordings. It teaches the difference between healthy and struggling soundscapes, then asks you to flag fish noises in short clips so marine researchers can process a mountain of underwater audio.

What is Calling in Our Corals?

This is less virtual aquarium and more ear-training booth. The project starts with contrasting reef soundscapes, introduces the pops, chirps, croaks, and other clues made by marine life, then hands over short hydrophone recordings for classification. Each click adds a small human judgment to a larger bioacoustic dataset gathered across ten reef locations. The premise is wonderfully direct: underwater health can be heard, but scientists cannot personally sift every recorded hour.

What you can do there

• Compare healthy and unhealthy reef soundscapes
• Learn to recognize fish and ocean sounds
• Mark fish sounds in short research recordings

Why we picked it

The task is tiny enough to try on a whim yet connected to a genuine research bottleneck. Instead of asking for a donation or a vague pledge, it gives visitors one learnable action and explains why that action matters. Later project reporting says the listening collective worked through more than 400 hours of audio, a satisfying sign that all those little clicks accumulated into useful material.

How to get the most from it

Use headphones if possible and begin with the healthy-versus-unhealthy comparison before attempting a research clip. Replay examples until the fish sounds separate from shrimp crackle and general underwater noise, then click only when you hear the target. A careful pass is more useful than treating it like a speed game.

Good to know

Sound is the whole instrument here, and the interactive requires JavaScript. The public task labels reef recordings for monitoring and model development; it does not directly operate underwater speakers or restore a reef by itself. Captioning, transcripts, non-audio alternatives, device support, account behavior, and the current flow of new annotations are not clearly documented.

Who made it, and when?

Steve Simpson, Mary Shodipo, and Dave Erasmus is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is April 17, 2023.