And from that I kept sort of learning more about: well, I can see that they're interacting together, but I can also hear these different, for example, these tiny, little coral reef fish that are really chirping to each other, making these whooping sounds and, you know, synchronizing some of their acoustic sounds that they make with these little movements.

And so you very quickly realize that this is a place where there is-not only are they choosing and tailoring how they behave and how they move, they're really waiting for an opportunity to be heard as well.

And just like you have in forests that we might have around us, you have a dawn chorus when the sun rises, you have a dawn chorus that happens in coral reefs as well.

So they're all coming out of their little safe spots and making themselves heard.

And so you can't kind of ignore that; they're really using their voices.

So it became a point of trying to understand how they use the diversity of these different signals.

And especially, these are changing environments-they're really impacted-and so what does this mean when you have these interactions between these species and what that means for the ecosystem and its survival in the long term.

And what's your research focused on right now?

Yeah, so at the moment, I'm working on-we call it the WOPAM project.

So it stands for the World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring Project, which is a bit of a mouthful, but WOPAM is quite a fun way to shorten it down.

But what that means is we've got this big collaborative effort where, across the whole world, we-we, as bioacousticians, so people who focus on the sounds of biological life come together on World Oceans Day, and we listen to the sounds of the sea.

This one day where we're really taken into this window of: What do we hear, and how do we connect with those sounds and what we are actually discovering?

So it's an incredible collaborative effort.

This year we had 180 different bioacousticians listening in in 400 different parts of the world.

Very cool. And what's the benefit of, of getting everybody all listening on the same day-beyond, obviously, increasing awareness?

I would say, for the project, we can describe it as maybe four different fins to the creature of itself.

So one of them is, when you have this bioacoustic collaboration across this huge geographical scale, we're not listening in to one place for a very long period of time, which really gives you that depth of expertise in that one place, but we're looking at this scale of: What are we finding and discovering together?

When we look at this global perspective, what are some of the key questions that come up from that broad range of expertise of people who are used to listening in to the oceans?

And then actually go and try and answer that with those recordings that we've taken.

So, just for example, some people are incredible experts at understanding the migratory routes of some really important species-let's say, for example, humpback whales-and so when we take this global perspective, we might be able to understand, "Okay, well, how many times did we hear them, and how different were their songs in different parts of the planet?"

Which is important when you understand that some of these groups have different dialects, basically, between each other depending on the parts of the ocean that they occupy.

So you can start to tease away things like that, but also, equally, if we want to understand how much man-made, or human-made, noise is actually occupying these spaces, how much can they hear each other in the first place, we can start to look at a global perspective of that on that one day, and you can start to overlap some of these questions.

But then we also really want, and have been working with various artists, to think about, "Okay, well, let's explore what it means to listen to these sounds, what it means to immerse yourself.

And how do we connect to what we hear, you know?

Many people love engaging with listening to music and really connect emotionally to what we hear, so let's explore that a little bit with these divergent and diverse forms of expression."

So, for example, this year we worked with a fantastic musician, Alejandro Bernal from Colombia, and he took all the different sounds that he could hear from these different creatures, and he created an original score from it.

And so that was his form of, his form of engagement, his form of connection with it.

Then also you can take some of this as a tool-so bioacoustics, you know, is one of the ways in which we can monitor these environments because as I said with WOPAM, it's a passive acoustic monitoring.

Now that might sound a bit odd, but what that means actually is that we're not actively changing the space that we're listening in to.

We're not causing anything to happen. We're not making anything change. We're just listening.

And so you can really use that as a way to monitor these environments and look at: Okay, first of all, how are they changing?

But also there are amazing ongoing conservation strategies and, and conservation efforts that are going on around the world, and how can bioacoustics maybe help to better understand and better monitor some of those fantastic efforts that are happening?