"Wilderness is mainly in the mind's eye - to be a stranger in a strange land for a fraction of a second and create an other world where what is familiar and drab and safe is fleetingly unrecognisable yet beckons like a siren's song. A place like home yet a place like no other."
--------------------------
I seem to recall from our whaling discussion that the human ear can only hear sounds above 65 decibels under water whereas in air we can hear down to 1 decibel, the sound of a mosquito at few metres distance.
Which raises the interesting issue of how much of the real wilderness we are capable of detecting with our limited sensory arrays. We miss the infra-red spectrum as seen by snakes etc and certainly most of the estimated 50,000 smell vocabulary of Beagle's and other dogs.
So it would seem that wilderness, like history, is little more than the confused accounts of witnesses.
You often have to dive down a little to hear well, and be patient. If you're on the reef, fish that croak and grunt may be put off by your presence initially. Something you should be able to hear are snapping shrimp, which to an unassisted human ear in water sounds a little like crumpling paper. You can hear wrasse munching on the coral and sometimes little territorial fish make grunt-like sounds at you. It's the same process as learning to see underwater and notice what is going on, and sadly both our eyes and ears are pretty useless in the water unless assisted. Hence the wonders of a hydrophone!