Do fish sing? The short answer is: Sort of
New research is showing that even some of the tiniest ones make sounds so loud, they would register as something like a gunshot above ground.
The oceans, lakes and rivers are apparently alive with a kind of music.
It turns out that fish have been singing for hundreds of millions of years, in an orchestra of thumps, clicks, grunts, plops, screeches, squeals and hums.
We only started listening in about 150 years ago, though it’s been known that fish have “voices” for over 2,000 years. (It was Aristotle, in 350 BCE, who first noted that fish “emit certain inarticulate sounds and squeaks”. In an aside, what did the man not do?).
Thousands of years later, work in the field of marine bioacoustics began in earnest in the post-war 1950s, amid improvements in hydrophone technology. It was in fact the war that prompted the US to fund and focus on this field. They were tired of submariners hearing sounds akin to enemy craft, only to surface and find no one there. Could it be fish making all the noise?
Until this point, most scientists didn’t think about fish as having voices. This class of animals, after all, has no lungs, windpipe, larynx or blowholes (as aquatic mammals like whales and dolphins do).
Nonetheless, after the war, the US Navy turned to a prominent scientist who is now considered the founder of marine bioacoustics: the aptly named Marie Fish. She used the latest hydrophones to listen to over 220 species of fish, and recorded over 150 of them, creating the first such repository. Her recordings included the booming of the black drum, one of the loudest known fish species, whose low-frequency mating call has been known to keep residents awake in coastal Tampa on winter nights.
Acquiring these recordings wasn’t easy. “Fish sounds can be quite transient, quiet or rare,” says Audrey Looby, an ecologist with the University of Florida. They are context-specific. Fish make their sounds only at certain times of day or year, or linked to certain behaviours.
Seahorses click during competitive feeding. Clownfish chirp and pop to establish social hierarchies. Toadfish males use loud hums to attract females to nests in breeding season. Groupers call in large in choruses to help attract females to an area.
Since 2021, Looby and a team of other researchers from the universities of Florida, Victoria and Sao Paulo have been building an open-source repository of such vocalisations from around the world.
FishSounds draws on existing research dating to 1874. So far, it has catalogued 1,214 examinations of such noises. The collection, which comprises audio recordings from across 60 countries, is searchable by species, region, climate and water type.
It’s just a beginning, Looby says. “There are nearly 35,000 species of fish in the world, and only a tiny share have been studied for sound production so far.”
Understanding fish sounds is increasingly important, since changes in such graphs can reinforce data on changing biospheres, particularly amid growing threats such as oceanic activity and noise and light pollution generated by human activity, she adds. “Such data offers clues on changing fish populations, they can help researchers detect invasive species, and they can help us evaluate ecosystem health.”
Sound plan
Interestingly, the ability to produce sound is not an ancestral trait in fish. It evolved independently, as a means of better underwater communication, given that the scattering of light and particles in water can impede sight, and diffusion can make smell less effective.
Because they were not built for sound, they use unusual tools to make it. Some, like the Atlantic croaker, have developed specialised sonic muscles that vibrate against the swim bladder, which is a large air chamber present in the abdomen of most fish.
Marine catfish use pectoral fin spines to make a squeaking noise. Species of seahorse and catfish make their sounds by rubbing hard skeletal parts or their teeth together, similar to the mechanisms used by crickets and cicadas on land.
One of the tiniest fish species, the 1-cm-long Danionella cerebrum, makes a loud pulsing sound using a similar mechanism. Researchers from the Charité university in Berlin found that along with the specialised muscle, it also uses a drumming cartilage which hits against its swim bladder, producing a noise that, above ground, would register as 140 decibels (dB), or about as loud as a gunshot.
“To hear the fix, you have to be very close to it, though, since sound travels very differently in water,” says Verity Cook, lead author of a paper on this, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February. “Only a small fraction of the noise made under water actually travels through the surface and into the air. But the sounds can in fact be heard clearly by a human when standing next to the aquarium, which shows how loud they really are.”
Sea this, hear that
Technology of various kinds is now coming together to help boost research in this field.
In addition to far more sensitive and durable hydrophones, some of which are incorporated into underwater ocean observatories, computer programs help sort through the terabytes of acoustic data thus gathered, to visualise, describe and analyse the sources of sounds.
Part of the mission of FishSounds, in fact, is to enable collaboration between scientists and researchers, so that data can be shared and better understood. “Given the sheer scale of the recordings now available, it is incredibly important to create tools and foster community in order to keep the field moving forward,” says Looby.
As for the rest of us, we might want to listen more carefully, the next time we find ourselves near a waterbody.
“Our soundscape is dominated by our experiences of living on land,” says Cook. “We rarely spend time with our heads underwater, listening. And perhaps that is why people underestimate the complexity of fish behaviour and don’t think to ask what they might be capable of.”
So, the next time you go swimming, keep the ears peeled.
The oceans, lakes and rivers are apparently alive with a kind of music.
It turns out that fish have been singing for hundreds of millions of years, in an orchestra of thumps, clicks, grunts, plops, screeches, squeals and hums.
We only started listening in about 150 years ago, though it’s been known that fish have “voices” for over 2,000 years. (It was Aristotle, in 350 BCE, who first noted that fish “emit certain inarticulate sounds and squeaks”. In an aside, what did the man not do?).
Thousands of years later, work in the field of marine bioacoustics began in earnest in the post-war 1950s, amid improvements in hydrophone technology. It was in fact the war that prompted the US to fund and focus on this field. They were tired of submariners hearing sounds akin to enemy craft, only to surface and find no one there. Could it be fish making all the noise?
Until this point, most scientists didn’t think about fish as having voices. This class of animals, after all, has no lungs, windpipe, larynx or blowholes (as aquatic mammals like whales and dolphins do).
Nonetheless, after the war, the US Navy turned to a prominent scientist who is now considered the founder of marine bioacoustics: the aptly named Marie Fish. She used the latest hydrophones to listen to over 220 species of fish, and recorded over 150 of them, creating the first such repository. Her recordings included the booming of the black drum, one of the loudest known fish species, whose low-frequency mating call has been known to keep residents awake in coastal Tampa on winter nights.
Acquiring these recordings wasn’t easy. “Fish sounds can be quite transient, quiet or rare,” says Audrey Looby, an ecologist with the University of Florida. They are context-specific. Fish make their sounds only at certain times of day or year, or linked to certain behaviours.
Seahorses click during competitive feeding. Clownfish chirp and pop to establish social hierarchies. Toadfish males use loud hums to attract females to nests in breeding season. Groupers call in large in choruses to help attract females to an area.
Since 2021, Looby and a team of other researchers from the universities of Florida, Victoria and Sao Paulo have been building an open-source repository of such vocalisations from around the world.
FishSounds draws on existing research dating to 1874. So far, it has catalogued 1,214 examinations of such noises. The collection, which comprises audio recordings from across 60 countries, is searchable by species, region, climate and water type.
It’s just a beginning, Looby says. “There are nearly 35,000 species of fish in the world, and only a tiny share have been studied for sound production so far.”
Understanding fish sounds is increasingly important, since changes in such graphs can reinforce data on changing biospheres, particularly amid growing threats such as oceanic activity and noise and light pollution generated by human activity, she adds. “Such data offers clues on changing fish populations, they can help researchers detect invasive species, and they can help us evaluate ecosystem health.”
Sound plan
Interestingly, the ability to produce sound is not an ancestral trait in fish. It evolved independently, as a means of better underwater communication, given that the scattering of light and particles in water can impede sight, and diffusion can make smell less effective.
Because they were not built for sound, they use unusual tools to make it. Some, like the Atlantic croaker, have developed specialised sonic muscles that vibrate against the swim bladder, which is a large air chamber present in the abdomen of most fish.
Marine catfish use pectoral fin spines to make a squeaking noise. Species of seahorse and catfish make their sounds by rubbing hard skeletal parts or their teeth together, similar to the mechanisms used by crickets and cicadas on land.
One of the tiniest fish species, the 1-cm-long Danionella cerebrum, makes a loud pulsing sound using a similar mechanism. Researchers from the Charité university in Berlin found that along with the specialised muscle, it also uses a drumming cartilage which hits against its swim bladder, producing a noise that, above ground, would register as 140 decibels (dB), or about as loud as a gunshot.
“To hear the fix, you have to be very close to it, though, since sound travels very differently in water,” says Verity Cook, lead author of a paper on this, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February. “Only a small fraction of the noise made under water actually travels through the surface and into the air. But the sounds can in fact be heard clearly by a human when standing next to the aquarium, which shows how loud they really are.”
Sea this, hear that
Technology of various kinds is now coming together to help boost research in this field.
In addition to far more sensitive and durable hydrophones, some of which are incorporated into underwater ocean observatories, computer programs help sort through the terabytes of acoustic data thus gathered, to visualise, describe and analyse the sources of sounds.
Part of the mission of FishSounds, in fact, is to enable collaboration between scientists and researchers, so that data can be shared and better understood. “Given the sheer scale of the recordings now available, it is incredibly important to create tools and foster community in order to keep the field moving forward,” says Looby.
As for the rest of us, we might want to listen more carefully, the next time we find ourselves near a waterbody.
“Our soundscape is dominated by our experiences of living on land,” says Cook. “We rarely spend time with our heads underwater, listening. And perhaps that is why people underestimate the complexity of fish behaviour and don’t think to ask what they might be capable of.”
So, the next time you go swimming, keep the ears peeled.