Hums, honks and boops? That’s just fish chatting about sex and food

The primordial deep is a busy place.

Cornell University researchers found that fish rely on acoustic communication far more than they had thought.

People have known for a long time that fish make noises and produce sounds by grinding their own bones against each other. For decades, a lack of adequate underwater microphones and recording technology has kept scientists in the dark about just how many species of fish make noises, and whether those noises are actually communication.

The K Lisa Yang Center forConservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell has found that sounds are a major mode of communication among fish. Rice's analysis of sound-produced physical characteristics across species suggests that ancient sturgeons first started chatting aloud 155 million years ago, right around the same time some tetrapods.

The study found that acoustic communication among different fish species has evolved at least 33 different times. The pattern suggests that there are more soniferous fish species and families out there, and highlights the importance of acoustic communication in the history of the fish.

What are fish talking about? Sex and food seem to be the main things being produced in reproductive contexts. Scientists use a variety of onomatopoeic descriptors to describe how these noises sound to humans. Some fish, like the three-spined toadfish, emit low, haunting, foghorn-like hums, whereas others, like the midshipman fish, emit low, haunting, foghorn-like hums. It has been found that fish with strong regional accents can be hard to understand in other species.

Knowing the extent to which fish communicate using sound allows researchers to better determine the effects of noise pollution on many different aquatic species. At least 21 species of fish that rely on their hearing to thrive are negatively affected by noise pollution, according to researchers. The threat posed by noise pollution is even more severe according to a study by Cornell.

Rice hopes that capturing and cataloging fish sounds online will allow the public an opportunity to better connect with the often inscrutable creatures. It is possible to get people interested in and concerned for the wellbeing of fish by listening to the sounds of the ocean on a computer.

Andrew Bass hopes the research will help humans better appreciate the complexity of other animal societies.

The other species have been successful because of social communication. We can learn a lot from other animals.