Widespread Sound Communication Among Fish
upstart writes:
Look who's talking now: The fishes! Widespread sound communication among fish:
"We've known for a long time that some fish make sounds," said lead author Aaron Rice, a researcher at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "But fish sounds were always perceived as rare oddities. We wanted to know if these were one-offs or if there was a broader pattern for acoustic communication in fishes."
The authors looked at a branch of fishes called the ray-finned fishes. These are vertebrates (having a backbone) that comprise 99% of the world's known species of fishes. They found 175 families that contain two-thirds of fish species that do, or are likely to, communicate with sound. By examining the fish family tree, study authors found that sound was so important, it evolved at least 33 separate times over millions of years.
"Thanks to decades of basic research on the evolutionary relationships of fishes, we can now explore many questions about how different functions and behaviors evolved in the approximately 35,000 known species of fishes," said co-author William E. Bemis '76, Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "We're getting away from a strictly human-centric way of thinking. What we learn could give us some insight on the drivers of sound communication and how it continues to evolve."
The scientists used three sources of information: 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.
Journal Reference:
Aaron N. Rice, Stacy C. Farina, Andrea J. Makowski, et al. Evolutionary Patterns in Sound Production across Fishes [open], Ichthyology & Herpetology (DOI: 10.1643/i2020172)
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