Off Jamaica’s northern coast, where scenes from No Time to Die were filmed, divers are trying to help a fading coral reef with an unusual piece of equipment: underwater speakers.

The team is installing waterproof speakers on the seafloor to play the recorded sounds of a healthy reef for 14 hours a day. Solar panels floating on the surface power the system.

The project is led by Italian artist Marco Barotti, not a scientist.

“It’s very different from everything I did before,” Barotti says, according to The Guardian.

Five years ago, Barotti began creating sculptures based on 3D scans of coral after emerging research suggested sound could help revive struggling reefs.

“Sound has always been at the core of my work but never at this level,” he explains.

A healthy reef is loud, with snapping shrimp, grunting fish and shifting currents. A dying reef is quiet.

“If a reef is alive with sound it’s most likely to stay alive right? And repopulate. And when reefs degrade they grow silent,” Barotti says.

Fish and tiny coral organisms use sound to find a home in the ocean. The idea behind the project is that bringing those sounds back could draw marine life back too.

Research has pointed to results from what is known as “acoustic enrichment”. A study published in the journal Nature found that playing healthy reef sounds at degraded parts of the Great Barrier Reef doubled the total fish population in six weeks.

The study also found species diversity increased by 50 percent.

Coral reefs cover 1 percent of the ocean floor but support 25 percent of all marine life.

Since 1950, the planet has lost about half its coral reefs because of overfishing, pollution and the climate crisis.

A record marine heatwave in 2023 turned Caribbean waters into a “hot tub”, causing corals to expel the algae living in their tissues. The bleaching left coral white, starving and vulnerable to disease.

Lee-Ann Rando, a second-generation scuba diving instructor, says she has watched the decline up close.

“It’s getting quieter,” she says. “It’s really sad to say that I’ve seen the degradation a lot in the past 10 years.”

Rando filmed herself swimming through bleached reefs in 2023.

“You just feel hopeless,” she says. “You feel like, ‘Am I ever gonna see this again?’”

The sound project supports work by the local Alligator Head Foundation.

Dexter Dean Colquhoun, the foundation’s head of research, says the idea clicked with him straight away.

“I’m a musician. I play piano, so I know the importance and the power of sound.”

He says the acoustic approach adds to the foundation’s reef restoration work.

“It fits right into what we’re trying to do, which is to restore the reefs using as many methods as possible.”

In the lab, researcher Bethany Dean grows coral fragments and works on assisted breeding to help coral reproduce as warming waters disrupt natural reproduction.

“We are looking at how you can bring these eggs and sperm together so you can actually have successful reproduction,” Dean says.

Those lab-grown coral fragments are eventually attached to Barotti’s underwater sculptures.

“You gotta stay hopeful right?” says Rando. “I think there is hope. There are strands of it.”

Read more from The Guardian.