Think back to the last concert you went to. Now replace the music that rang through the venue with an erratic series of pops, muffled staccatos, distorted taps, and sudden clicks. Not one sound is quite distinguishable from the other, all blending together in a medley of unsynchronized noise.
Except, instead of musicians, what you’re hearing is a mass of underground invertebrates. And they’re putting on an unorthodox show for the handful of humans who know where, and how, to tune in — a complex symphony of vibrations and pulses that relay the state of the very soils these organisms are moving within.
“You can actually use sound to listen to the soil, and get an indication of soil health, based on the little critters moving around,” said Jake Robinson, a microbial ecologist at Flinders University in Australia. He’s the lead author of a study just published in the Journal of Applied Ecology that found that ecoacoustics, or the study of environmental sounds, can not only be used to detect organisms in the soil, but also mined to identify the difference between restored and degraded land. READ FULL ARTICLE