Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Remote Sens.

Sec. Acoustic Remote Sensing

This article is part of the Research TopicDetection and Characterization of Unidentified Underwater Biological Sounds, Their Spatiotemporal Patterns and Possible Sources.View all 11 articles

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

Provisionally accepted
Lucille ChapuisLucille Chapuis1*Tzu-Hao LinTzu-Hao Lin2Ben WilliamsBen Williams3Timothy A. C. LamontTimothy A. C. Lamont4Rucha KarkareyRucha Karkarey4Gabriela G Nava-MartínezGabriela G Nava-Martínez5Aya Maryam Rahil NaseemAya Maryam Rahil Naseem6Andrew N RadfordAndrew N Radford1Stephen D SimpsonStephen D Simpson1
  • 1University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
  • 2Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
  • 3University College London, London, England, United Kingdom
  • 4Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, United Kingdom
  • 56 Oceanus, A.C. Reef Restoration Program, Quintana Roo, Mexico
  • 6Maldives Coral Institute, Male', Maldives

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Select one of your emails

You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:

Notify me on publication

Please enter your email address:

If you already have an account, please login

You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here

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 hours 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 (< 1 s), low-frequency sounds (~500 Hz). The UMAP embedding, based on five key acoustic parameters, revealed a largely homogeneous distribution of fish calls across geographical locations. These results suggest that coral reef fish calls exhibit a level of global consistency, potentially reflecting the conserved structure of fish communities across different biogeographic realms. This study emphasises the potential of unknown fish call analyses as a non-invasive tool to explore fish diversity and assemblages, with future work required to extend these findings to other marine ecosystems and integrate automated species identification systems.

Keywords: fish, Call, coral reef, detection, geometric morphometrics

Received: 04 Nov 2024; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Chapuis, Lin, Williams, Lamont, Karkarey, Nava-Martínez, Naseem, Radford and Simpson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Lucille Chapuis

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material