The ocean might seem like a quiet place, but listen carefully and you might just hear the sounds of the fish choir.
Most of this underwater music comes from soloist fish, repeating the same calls over and over. But when the calls of different fish overlap, they form a chorus.
Robert McCauley and colleagues at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, recorded vocal fish in the coastal waters off Port Hedland in Western Australia over an 18-month period, and identified seven distinct fish choruses, happening at dawn and at dusk.
The low “foghorn” call is made by the blackspotted croaker (Protonibea diacanthus) while the grunting call that researcher Miles Parsons compares to the “buzzer in the Operation board game” comes from a species of Terapontid. The third chorus is a quieter batfish that makes a “ba-ba-ba” call.
Read more & listen to the chorus here: new scientist
