A universal symphony : coral reef fish calls exhibit consistent acoustic characteristics across different bioregions

Chapuis, Lucille and Lin, Tzu-Hao and Williams, Ben and Lamont, Timothy A. C. and Karkarey, Rucha and Nava-Martínez, Gabriela G. and Naseem, Aya Maryam Rahil and Radford, Andrew N. and Simpson, Stephen D. (2025) A universal symphony : coral reef fish calls exhibit consistent acoustic characteristics across different bioregions. Frontiers in Remote Sensing, 6: 1522641. ISSN 2673-6187

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Abstract

Coral reefs host diverse fish communities, many of which produce sounds. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become an essential tool for studying these ecosystems, yet the variability in fish calls across regions remains poorly understood. In this study, we analysed 144 h of underwater recordings collected from six coral reef locations around the world, automatically detecting more than 120,000 fish calls. Using Geometric Morphometrics Methods (GMM), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), we examined both the three-dimensional shape and spectro-temporal properties of these sounds. The GMM analysis revealed that fish calls showed remarkable acoustic similarity across geographical areas, with the first two principal components explaining 33% of the total variance. Typical fish calls consisted of short (