Study Reveals Just Like Humans, Fish Also Have 'Voices' And Now You Can Hear Them
Life under turbulent oceans is surprisingly silent in comparison to the sounds and chatter above the water. While it was known for thousands of years that some fishes, including whales, produce sounds, fishes were mostly considered to be silent. But in a 2022 study, now published in Ichthyology & Herpetology, scientists collected some acoustic recordings that suggested that an ocean is as filled with noise as the world above its surface. Like most terrestrial animals, fishes too communicate with sounds such as drums, grunts, crackle, whoop, purrs, clicks, plops, screeches, hums, moans, and even farts. Most of them vibrate their digestive tracts to emit these sounds for purposes ranging from finding food and mating to self-defense.
"We've known for a long time that some fish make sounds, but fish sounds were always perceived as rare oddities," Cornell University ecologist Aaron Rice said in a press release. He said that fish sounds were usually known as “rare oddities,” and stated that his team's goal was to verify whether this acoustic behavior stretched to a larger fish community. To begin with, they studied a family-level phylogeny of ray-finned fishes, a clade containing more than 34,000 extant species.
The team used three sources of information to conduct this research, including “existing recordings and scientific papers describing fish sounds; the known anatomy of a fish – whether they have the right tools for making sounds, such as certain bones, an air bladder and sound-specific muscles; and references in 19th century literature before underwater microphones were invented,” according to the press release. Scientists started using acoustic monitoring primarily during the 1930s when hydrophones were invented to detect sounds of nearby submarines or torpedoes fired by them.
It was assumed that when it comes to fishes, they usually communicate with electricity or colors. Though it was known that whales and dolphins do sing, other fishes were usually assumed to be non-soniferous. Andrew Bass, co-lead author, said that the science of acoustic communication was previously restricted to dolphins and whales, but now we know that “fishes have voices too.” Along with the paper, the team shared sounds recorded from midshipman fishes and longspine squirrel fishes.
All the studies that follow have only reiterated this soniferous behavior prevalent among fish. In February 2024, some German researchers discovered that one of the world’s smallest fish, a tiny transparent fish measuring about the width of an adult human fingernail, makes a sound that resembles a gunshot, an ambulance siren, or a pneumatic drill. They do this to establish their hierarchy. But these underwater chatterers could have other motives for engaging in these sonic chats. “Fish tend to pipe up for reproductive and territorial reasons. Or, more simply, for food and sex,” Rice told BBC. Other reasons could be warning other fishes about a potential predator or repelling other fish.
Audrey Looby, an ecologist at the University of Florida who studies fish bioacoustics, has even compiled thousands of fish sounds in an online library called "FishSounds." From their database, the team discovered that some fish use “swim bladder vibration” to produce sounds while others use “striadulation, the movement of skeletal parts against each other.” Fish such as toadfish and catfish use swim bladder vibration, whereas anemonefish and catfish use stridulation. Some fishes employ “non swim bladder vibration,” resulting from vibration of the entire body, large parts of the body, or of muscles not associated with the swim bladder.
"Our results strongly support the hypothesis that soniferous behavior is ancient. Together, these findings highlight the strong selection pressure favoring the evolution of this character across vertebrate lineages,” the team said.