What does a fish say? A new sound library has answers

IFa Porkfish swimming and no one is there to hear it, does that make a sound?

A new effort to monitor the seas by Sound says, resolutely, yes. The ocean – in particular occupied places such as coral reefs – can be noisy. Mantis shrimp snow, the darling of the ladies. (Listen to the music from a cacophone reef here.) Other places have whales singing and crackling oysters. Not to mention all this human manufacturing noise.

But a large part of the ocean chatter was difficult to analyze. Who did that Whoosh or that popular? Answering these questions could provide detailed profiles from the inhabitants of particular ecosystems and, by proxy, their ecological health.

In recent years, scientists have mainly relied on visual surveys and environmental DNA to have an overview of ocean ecosystems. But these methods have drawbacks. A visual survey can only capture one point over time. And environmental DNA – the genetic traces that organisms leave behind – cannot say a lot to the researchers on where or when the creatures to which it belonged. The sound, however, in particular when associated with video follow -up, could overcome these shortcomings.

Who did this Whoosh or that popular?

A team of collaborative Fisheye scientists unfolds both in tandem to give meaning to the gossip of a coral reef in Curaçao in the Caribbean. With a video camera that follows the fish using an essentially 360 -degree vision and microphones to match, their system claims to be able to analyze the reef sounds and to allocate specific noises to different species of fish. They say they have still collected the largest library of specific fish sounds. Their work was published this month in Methods in ecology and evolution.

Associated with automatic learning, researchers suggest that their system could work as smartphones applications that can identify birds by their calls. Similar efforts to use bioacoustics for conservation efforts take place in all kinds of biomes to follow all kinds of animal populations, including leopards in Tanzania.

This acoustic monitoring could be a useful tool in the effort to preserve and restore coral reefs, which are essential to the health of the ocean. Not only do they help stamp the land from increasingly strong storms, but they also provide a large amount of food for the planet. And they suffer seriously. “Governments and NGOs invest billions in the protection and restoration of reefs,” said Marc Dantzker, executive director of collaborative Fisheye and study co-author. “We must ensure that these limited funds effectively be spent. We must follow how the reefs meet both stress factors and interventions. ” And he suggests that this type of long -term sound surveillance will be a boon of this effort.

The monitoring of oceanic acoustics in this methodical way could also surface new and obscure sounds, explains Matt Duggan, another co-author of the study which also works in the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Until now, the” most noisy “species, such as dolphins, whales and shrimp slam, have overshadowed the many other voices of the sea,” said Duggan. Discovering hidden voices can help scientists better measure the health and resilience of reefs worldwide. Of course, the sounds of animals were there. We just didn’t listen to.

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Main image: Peter Leahy / Shutterstock

• Katherine Harmon Courage

  Published on September 30, 2025

  Katherine Harmon Courage is the editor -in -chief of Nautilus.