the times | Saturday May 28 2022 15
News
British scientists have built an artificial
intelligence system that can monitor
the health of a coral reef by listening to
its “song”.
A reef that is thriving will produce a
complex array of sounds. Crustaceans
living around the coral will emit a near-
continuous chorus of pops and squeaks.
This underwater symphony resembles
the crackling of a campfire or the noise
of milk meeting a puffed rice cereal.
Fish will add “whoops, grunts and
knocks”, said Ben Williams of the Uni-
versity of Exeter, who led the research.
He and his colleagues exposed a
computer algorithm to recordings of
healthy and degraded reefs, which
allowed the machine to learn the differ-
ence between them.
The system then analysed a host of
new recordings, and successfully pre-
dicted the health of the reef that they
had come from 92 per cent of the time.
The team is using the technique in
reef restoration projects. “Coral reefs
are facing multiple threats including
climate change, so monitoring their
health and the success of conservation
projects is vital,” Williams said.
“One major difficulty is that visual
and acoustic surveys of reefs usually
rely on labour-intensive methods.
Visual surveys are also limited by the
fact that many reef creatures conceal
themselves, or are active at night, while
the complexity of reef sounds has madeTune in to music
of the choral reefs
Rhys Blakely Science Correspondent it difficult to identify reef health using
individual recordings.
“Our approach to that problem was
to use machine learning to see whether
a computer could learn the song of the
reef. Our findings show that a computer
can pick up patterns that are undetect-
able to the human ear. It can tell us fast-
er, and more accurately, how the reef is
doing.”
The recordings used in the study
were taken at the Mars Coral Reef Res-
toration Project, which is restoring
heavily damaged reefs in Indonesia.
The pops and squeaks include the
sounds of snapping shrimp. “They hunt
and defend themselves by snapping
specialised pincers together at lighting
speed to produce cavitation bubbles
that stun or kill prey,” Williams said.
“You’ll almost never see a snapping
shrimp they’re so well hidden, but
they’re so loud there’s almost nowhere
on coastal seabeds that you can go
without hearing them.”
Dr Tim Lamont of Lancaster Uni-
versity, a co-author of the study, said:
“This is a really exciting development.
Sound recorders and AI could be used... to monitor the health of reefs and dis-
cover whether attempts to protect and
restore them are working.
“In many cases it’s easier and cheaper
to deploy an underwater hydrophone
on a reef and leave it there than to have
expert divers visiting the reef repeated-
ly to survey it.” The study was published
in the journal Ecological Indicators.
TMS
[email protected] | @timesdiaryRoyal horse
whisp erer
As we near the jubilee, members of
the Lords paid tribute to the
Queen’s service. Lord De Mauley,
Master of the Horse, naturally
spoke of her interest in racing,
which remains a big success. She
has had five winners this month
alone, though De Mauley revealed
the Queen recently grumbled about
one slow dobbin, telling him: “I
could run faster than it in
gumboots.” Not bad given her
mobility problems. She also knows
how to control horses. De Mauley
was touring the stables with her
two years ago when an excitable
stallion reared its hooves. As the
Master of the Horse contemplated
having to dive in front of his
monarch to prevent her being
trampled, she simply lifted a
forefinger and very firmly said:
“No.” At this, the horse “sprang to
attention” and disaster was averted.Over 70 years, the Queen has seen
rapidly changing technology. Robert
Jenrick, MP for Newark, notes that in
the civil war his predecessor had
communicated with the king by
writing in cypher and concealing the
script in a lead ball, which he asked amessenger to swallow and then pass
out on arrival at court. “Fortunately,”
Jenrick said, “Her Majesty has proved
adept at using Zoom.”literally too ridiculous
Readers rightly complain whenever
they spy a misuse of “literally”,
though I hope not here. This isn’t a
modern problem. Samantha
Robinson, a reader, was ferreting in
an archive this week when she
found a complaint to The Times in
1949 from EW Fordham about a
writer who had asserted that “for
five years Mr Gladstone was
literally glued to the Treasury
Bench”. This led others to send in
horrors, my favourite being a report
that Monsieur Clemenceau, the
French prime minister, had “literally
exploded” during an argument.degree of sophistication
The leaders of the Russian
revolution, the subject of AntonyBeevor’s new book, were so keen to
demonstrate the new social order
they picked up a random bearded
peasant on their way to a dinner
with the European powers to mark
the end of the war. “He realised he
was on to a good thing,” Beevor said
in a talk at the How To Academy,
but his etiquette needed polish.
When the wine waiter asked if he
wanted red or white, the peasant
replied: “Which is stronger?”Dame Jenni Murray was thrilled to be
asked to launch a Saga river cruise
ship recently. “I felt like royalty,” the
broadcaster says. “And then I didn’t,
because it took four attempts to break
the bottle.” As fizz remained resolutely
unshowered over the bow of Spirit of
the Danube, Murray, above, was
reassured that the same thing had
happened to the Duchess of Cornwall.close shave with a sheriff
American traffic police are not
known for their charity so the folk
singer Al Stewart says he feared the
worst when he crashed his rental
car into a ditch in Tennessee in the
mid-70s, especially when the sheriff
got a pair of garden shears from the
back of his police car. “I’m gonna
fine you $75 but I’ll let you off if
you let me cut your hair,” the sheriff
said. Stewart wisely took the fine.patrick kidd