Across the Vineyard Sound at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), scientists are playing a lullaby for baby oysters.
The lullaby is an underwater soundscape of North Carolina — a recording from a healthy oyster reef’s habitat. In June and July, the team from WHOI’s Sensory Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab also collected oyster reef recordings from Tisbury Great Pond. It has been shown that wild oyster reefs respond positively to the sounds, or vibrations, of healthy reefs. Now, the lab is trying to see which region’s soundscape New England’s oysters respond to best.
“What sound cue would work best for them? Do they have essentially a Boston accent?” said senior scientist Aran Mooney.
When oysters reach the larval stage, they must settle — attach themselves to a hard substrate — in order to metamorphosize and grow. Metamorphosis takes a certain amount of energy, said Emma Green-Beach, executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group. The faster oyster larvae can settle, the better chance it has to survive into adulthood, and settlement often requires certain cues like vibrations, temperature and biological chemicals.
“It’s kind of a time crunch,” said Ms. Green-Beach. “If they’re wandering around aimlessly lost because maybe the wrong sounds or the wrong chemicals are confusing them, they are going to run out of energy before they settle.”
The shellfish group is supporting the lab’s project with oyster larvae spawned from Tisbury Great Pond broodstock, and information about the Vineyard’s oyster reefs. The West Tisbury and Chilmark shellfish constables helped pick the location on Tisbury Great Pond where WHOI’s lab dropped their recording devices into the wild oyster reef. They did it around the time when oysters are both spawning and settling — a “happy time” for the shellfish, said Ms. Green-Beach. The devices pick up on the activities of local fish and other organism populations, filtered through the specific physical structure of the reef.
Over the next few months, the bioacoustics lab will listen to the Vineyard’s soundscape, analyzing it and filtering out boat noises. Next year, after measuring the oysters’ response to the North Carolina reef soundscape, the lab will play back the New England ones, from Damariscotta, Me., Wellfleet and the Vineyard.
“It’s sort of a Duke versus Harvard experiment,” said Mr. Mooney.
“Maybe they like the quiet [of the Vineyard],” added Ms. Green-Beach. “Maybe they like the richness that a North Carolina estuary has that the Vineyard doesn’t.”
That richness includes surrounding species like toadfish, snapping shrimp and spotted sea trout.
The project has implications for the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group, which breeds oysters for restoration purposes. The hatchery is a noisy place, surrounded by the hums, pumps and gurgles of their tanks and machinery.
“If it’s masking those cues that [oysters are] supposed to hear, then it may be harder for them to find a settlement,” said Ms. Green-Beach.
In the hatchery, time is money, she said. Every day spent waiting for the oysters to settle costs the shellfish group in time and resources. The goal is to improve settlement, which the group does already by introducing healthy adult oysters to give off the correct chemical cues and “beautiful shell, perfect substrate” for the oyster larvae to attach to, said Ms. Green-Beach.
“Then can I play this perfect lullaby to say, ‘Come hither,’” she said. “That anthem that says, ‘this is home.’”
Scientists can do that in the wild, too. In keeping with the music theme, labs use RAPS (Reef Acoustic Playback System) where they can upload sound files of healthy reefs, said Mr. Mooney. The system is enclosed in a watertight case, held by a buoy on the surface. The speaker then goes into the estuary or ocean.
Like coral reefs, wild oyster reefs have been degraded over the past few hundred years due to overfishing, pollution and disease. Reefs break up 97 per cent of wave energy, said Mr. Mooney, thus protecting the shore and preventing erosion. Reefs are also hotspots of biodiversity, providing nooks and crannies of habitat for other sea life.
Playing healthy reef sounds isn’t quite a silver bullet, said Mr. Mooney, but it may be a “reef booster shot.”
“There’s not as much larvae as there used to be,” he said. “We degraded the reefs, we took out the reefs, and so we don’t have that natural larval pool. So maybe you need to give it that booster shot to keep the healthy larvae coming back.”
Both WHOI’s lab and the shellfish group are excited about the project and what it could mean for the oyster reefs.
“It’s like taking care of babies,” said Mr. Mooney. “It’s very hard, and maybe underappreciated.”
“There’s a lot of little nuances to it,” Ms. Green-Beach added.
This article appears in July 31, 2026.