Homing in on Home

Justin Suca dives to the seafloor to install an audio recorder off the coast of the island of St. John in the Caribbean Sea. Suca, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, is investigating whether tiny larval fish use sound to navigate from the open ocean where they hatch to coral reefs where they will eventually live. He and his Ph.D. advisor, WHOI biologist Joel Llopiz, are interested in whether fish larvae are homing in on the sounds of a healthy reef in deciding where to settle. The audio recorders will help them figure out what “home,” and a healthy reef, sounds like. (Ian Happ, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)