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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

In my latest column for OnEarth, I make an impassioned case for saving the moon: flatly banning any private, commercial, or mining activity, and preserving the moon for all humanity as a sole province for science. Make the moon the next Antarctica. Maybe you’re thinking: “Wait, but isn’t the moon already protected by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967?” It is, sort of, but not sufficiently in my view. The OST, drafted by the United Nations and signed by all the major space-faring nations, prohibits any country from claiming any part of the moon (or any region in space) as national property. But private ownership remains an open question; most space lawyers (and there are a lot more these days than there used to be) would say that private individuals can’t own lunar property, but in fact the issue is muddy. This matters, given the growing push to commercialize space travel and development; NASA won’t get us back to the moon anytime soon (especially after killing the Constellation program), but with the right financial incentives, private companies might. The same companies would have even more incentive, and investors, if they were assured commercial rights on the moon–to buy or lease lunar acreage, to mine the mineral wealth thought to exist there, or bottle some of that moon water that was recently discovered. (Hence the burgeoning profession of space law. Some of the legal arguments and proposals for opening the moon up to development, like this one from Rosanna Sattler, are actually pretty compelling.) I know, I know, such prospects are all decades away. All the more reason to act now, I say, and preserve the place before anyone figures out it might be worth buying and selling. Let’s save the moon!

I’m not sure where I started, but I’ve been fascinated by sound for a long time now. Some years back I wrote a long piece for Harper’s about the audio archives of the Smithsonian Folkways label, which contain an amazingly eclectic array of recordings, from classic folk and blues musicians to then-everyday — and now largely extinct — sounds, including “Sounds of the Office, 1952,“ “Music of the Carousel,” “Sounds of the Annual International Sports Car Grand Prix of Watkins Glen, N.Y” and a five-volume set of the sounds of steam locomotives. I was particularly interested in the nature-related stuff, like the 1958 “Sounds of North American Frogs” and the 1960 “Sounds of Insects.” But I was especially intrigued by “Sounds of the Sea, Volume One,” recorded in 1952 by some audio engineers at the Naval Research Laboratory in 1952 who basically dropped a microphone to the ocean floor and listened in. Somehow it had never occurred to me that fishes make noise, or that they do so willfully, but the evidence was clear: eeries cries from the depths; rasps and bleats, roars and clicks, from rockfish, toadfish, sea robins, and croakers.

I thought of that recording recently while writing about marine biologist Stephen Simpson, in my latest installment of The Synthesist. Simpson studies coral reefs and he has discovered, among other things, that every reef has its own sonic fingerprint: the community of snapping shrimp, clicking and croaking fish, creates an aural corona that is uniquely identifiable to any organism properly attuned to it. Indeed, it turns out that reef fish are capable of hearing even in the larval stage; the reef noise

is a homing beacon, Simpson says, “a roadmap that these organisms use to find their way.” Nor is the phenomenon restricted to fish. Recently Simpson and some colleagues working in the Caribbean found that baby corals — mere flea-sized sacks of cells — orient by sound before settling into a hardened station on the reef. They can choose a direction and go. “When the idea was first suggested, I thought it was pretty out there,” Simpson concedes. “Look at it: it’s a blob covered in hair cells, it doesn’t have a central nervous system, an auditory apparatus, or anything.” But, he notes, those hair cells, or cilia, are akin to those in our own inner ear, where, when waggled by vibrating particles, they help detect sound. The cilia on coral larvae my serve the same purpose; they may even be tuned to specific frequencies. In effect, every larva is an inside-out ear; the reef literally broadcasts itself into existence.

That’s just plain cool. The shame of it is that rising levels of background noise in the sea pose a potential threat to these sonic environments, as well as to the audio spectra that other marine organisms rely on for communication, reproduction, and survival. You can still  hear it, though, if you listen closely. Simpson kindly shared with me a recording he’d made of reef sounds, audible here. And the Discovery of the Sounds of the Sea website, operated by the University of Rhode Island, has a terrific online audio gallery of underseas noises from sources both familiar and surprising. Tune in, turn on, drop down …