The budget above reflects the basic costs for our team of three to carry out our coral experiment in Grand Bahama. Accommodation, food, tanks and BrainCoral tech will all be provided by partners Coral Vita, so these are excluded.

Additional Information

This project is the culmination of several years of work by our team on the intersection between sound and the ocean. In 2021, Dave Erasmus went on a sailing trip with Professor Steve Simpson of the University of Bristol and a documentary crew from the Southern tip of England to Glasgow for COP26. On the trip, the team recorded underwater audio documenting the migration of a species of snapping shrimp from the Mediterranean where they are normally found, all the way to the Hebrides. The following year, Dave founded Aqoustics, which is an AI- and machine learning-powered engine for underwater listening data. Aqoustics has already achieved significant milestones, including a 95% accuracy rate in identifying boat sounds and conducting successful citizen science projects. Aqoustics has also partnered with leading marine scientists and organisations such as Google, the London Interdisciplinary School and the UN World Oceans Day, to deliver immersive listening projects and experiences that highlight the importance of underwater acoustics in marine conservation. With Google, Aqoustics partnered on a coral-focussed project, Calling on our Coral, which encouraged citizen scientists to listen to underwater recordings and identify the sounds of healthy and unhealthy reefs. By feeding data back into the platform, citizens were able to support scientists in their work of monitoring ecosystem health, tracking illegal fishing and measuring success at restoration sites.

In 2023, Dave met Josh Pysanczyn, a Master of Science by Research candidate at the University of Exeter and Researcher at BBC Studios, whose research has provided the foundation for this application. Now, Dave, his wife and co-founder Chloe, and Josh are planning to run the experiment in collaboration with Coral Vita in their lab in the Bahamas, the Earthshot Prize-winning initiative which works to restore degraded coral reefs.

One of Josh's papers on this subject is available here, however the other 'previous experiments' referred to here are part of his Masters research and will be published online in the new year. Coral Vita's Brain Coral technology has not been made public yet, so unfortunately we're not able to link out to it. BrainCoral uses automation to facilitate manual processes in data collection, tasking and decision making. It ties a hyperspectral camera system with machine learning-based image analytics, customized workflows and a cloud-based database to make coral-focussed experiments seamless and efficient.