Ponds are magnets for life and a lot of that life is very noisy. Water beetles, bugs, fish, frogs, and even aquatic plants all produce sound creating a diverse underwater orchestra that scientists are only just starting to understand.
To better understand these mysterious soundscapes, the team collected 840 hours of underwater sound recordings from five ponds in the southwest of England using an underwater microphone.
Using this acoustic method, the presence of species, and a determination of ecological health, can be inferred simply by listening to the natural world without disturbing the environment or harming the plants and animals within it. This research is the first to provide a detailed description of pond soundscapes in the UK and will help inform the acoustic monitoring of freshwater ecosystems to help prevent irreversible species loss due to climate change and habitat loss.
Paper: ‘Diel variation in insect-dominated temperate pond soundscapes and guidelines for survey design’ by Greenhalgh, J. A., Genner, M. J., & Jones, G. in Freshwater Biology [open access]