This story is a part of the GenOcean campaign — an official Ocean Decade campaign showcasing Decade Actions, collaborating organizations and ocean leaders that focus on youth and citizen science opportunities to help anyone, anywhere be the change the ocean needs.
In 2005, while on holiday in Cancún, marine biology student Heather Spence found herself wondering who was responsible for managing marine resources and assessing anthropogenic impacts on the coral reef. That question led her to Dr. Jaime González Cano, the director of the local Marine Protected Area (CONANP). From him, Heather learned just how strained coastal communities can be: tourism drives the economy, yet the very ecosystems that attract visitors receive minimal funding for monitoring and management.
Back in the United States to finish her master’s degree, Heather carried a weighty challenge with her: how can we monitor vast marine areas with minimal resources? In the lab, she had studied snapping shrimp or pistol shrimp, a tiny crustacean whose rapid claw snap generates one of the loudest sounds in the animal kingdom. As she listened to their collective clicks dominating the coral‑reef soundscape, a new idea began to take shape: what if we could “see” reef health through sound?
Through her lifelong connection to music, Spence resonated with this idea. A musician and composer since childhood, she had always related to the world through rhythm and tone, listening for the stories embedded in natural soundscapes. So, she began to imagine tuning in to those sounds to better understand reef health, listening to the ocean as a way to support conservation.
“The ocean is a world of sound, and if we listen through Passive Acoustic Monitoring we can obtain big data sets with minimal resources,” she says.
Heather came back to Cancún and started working with Dr. Jaime González Cano and the MPA team to launch “Ears in the Caribbean,” the first-ever Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) program in the Mesoamerican Reef. Years later, Spence’s initiative evolved into Ocean World of Sound (WOS), a global, transdisciplinary movement based in Cancún, Mexico, empowering communities to protect the ocean using the transformational power of sound.
Recognizing the impact WOS could have as part of the Ocean Decade, Heather and the WOS team, including underwater photographer and storyteller, Raymundo Santisteban, initiated Ocean World of Sound: MesoAmerican Reef as an endorsed action addressing three Ocean Decade Challenges:
4 – Develop a sustainable, resilient and equitable ocean economy
7 – Sustainably expand the Global Ocean Observing System
9 – Skills, knowledge, technology and participation for all
Why Sound?
The Mesoamerican Reef is the second-largest barrier reef system in the world, stretching from Mexico through Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. But unlike Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, it remains vastly under-researched and vulnerable despite supporting the livelihoods of millions. The WOS team looks to a unique type of data to support the research and understanding of this ecosystem.
That’s where sound comes in. Underwater, light is quickly absorbed and scattered so visibility drops fast, especially in turbid coastal waters. Sound, by contrast, propagates about four times faster than in air, and can travel much farther. That efficiency is why many marine animals rely on sound to communicate, navigate, find food and avoid predators.
Using underwater microphones, WOS captures the ocean’s natural rhythms featuring fish calls, shrimp snaps, the subtle shift of tides and the human-made noise disrupting these interactions. This data collection method, known as marine Passive Acoustic Monitoring, is cost-efficient, non-invasive and incredibly effective. It allows researchers and community scientists to track changes in biodiversity, assess human impact and understand ecosystem health.
With more than 200 hours of underwater recordings collected over a decade from seven listening stations along the Mexican Caribbean coast, WOS offers valuable acoustic data to scientists and ocean enthusiasts alike.
“The great thing about PAM is that it produces sound data allowing anyone to actually listen to the ocean. You don’t need a Ph.D. or formal education; you just need to listen,” says Santisteban. “And the more you listen, the more you recognize the diverse sounds in the underwater soundscape. Eventually with practice and time, those sounds become patterns, and patterns show behaviors, highlighting the complexity of marine ecosystems. Understanding the ocean is the very first step towards conserving it, and we’re making this more accessible to people anywhere in the world through sound.”
Community Roots, Global Reach
At its core, Ocean World of Sound is about community-driven conservation. The team works hand-in-hand with local Marine Protected Areas, schools, artists and cultural leaders. They run programs in Spanish and English. They hold space for local knowledge and science to meet. They’re also building a replicable model, a way for other coastal communities, especially in developing nations, to use sound as a path to understanding and protecting their marine ecosystems.
“As tourism booms in places like Cancún and coastal Quintana Roo, as well as in other marine hotspots, the stakes are higher than ever,” says Santisteban. “With rapid development comes increased stress on reefs and marine ecosystems. By tuning in and teaching others to listen through our PAM workshops we have been hosting around the world, we are creating a bridge between people and the ocean they depend on.”
Since 2021, WOS has organized 31 events including talks, workshops and trainings, totaling 152 hours and reaching over 1,700 people. Their investment has resulted in the creation of a citizen science group in Cancún with participants from Mexico and Paris, a pilot project assessing coral restoration efforts using PAM in the Maldives and a collaborative citizen science project with the University of Cádiz (INMAR) using sound data to train machine learning models to detect marine mammal whistles.
Science Meets Storytelling
Ocean World of Sound doesn’t stop at data. What makes this initiative truly powerful is its fusion of science, art and community.
Through interactive workshops, educational challenges, art installations and citizen science projects, WOS invites young people, divers, artists and curious minds to engage in “active listening” which instills presence, attention and empathy.
“As a transdisciplinary team, we quickly realized how wide the gap between science and the community is,” says Santisteban. “The challenge is communication, not content, which is why scientific knowledge often stays within academic circles. So we spent a great deal of time refining the best way to present our work and, once we found it, we kept sharing that story with our community. Because in the end, that’s what science is, a way to tell the story of our universe and everything that inhabits it.”
“We know from music how powerful sound can be,” says Spence. “Listening to underwater soundscapes can be transporting, transformative, and inspire empathy and curiosity.”
Get Involved
Inspired to immerse yourself in the sounds of the reef? Take the WOS 30 Day Ocean Sound Challenge to strengthen your connection to the ocean and your skills in deep listening! Stay updated on WOS science, workshops and citizen science opportunities by visiting their website.
Read more GenOcean stories on our webpage.
