By: Inas Essa

As it turns out, Finding Nemo and other works featuring talking fish are not completely fiction. A new study from Cornell University has found that fish can communicate with sound; such thing that we have been considering only fictitious.

Researchers of the new study, which was recently published in the Journal Ichthyology & Herpetology, say that fish have been communicating with sound for at least 155 million years. 

The authors wanted to know—through their study—if there is one or broader pattern for acoustic communication in fish. They conducted their research on a branch of fish called the ray-finned fish, which has a backbone (vertebrates) that is included in almost 99% of the world's known species of fish.

Millions of Years in Evolution

The study's results highlighted 175 families that contain two-thirds of fish species, which communicate with sound or are more likely to do so. The researchers indicated that sound was so important in communication and it evolved at least 33 separate times over millions of years.

"We have 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. William E. Bennis, the co-author of the study, adds: “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".

Fish Overlooked!

Through the study, researchers implemented different sources of information: 

1- Existing recordings and scientific papers describing fish sounds;

2- Known anatomy of a fish—whether they have the right tools to make sounds, such as certain bones, an air bladder, and sound-specific muscles; and

3- References in 19^th-century literature before underwater microphones were invented.

Curiously, studying sound communication in fish has been overlooked for years, although they make up more than half of all living vertebrate species, according to scientists. "They have probably been overlooked because fishes are not easily heard or seen, and the science of underwater acoustic communication has primarily focused on whales and dolphins. But fishes have voices, too!" says Andrew Bass, co-lead author and the Horace White Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior in the College of Arts and Sciences.

So, What Do Fish Talk about?

Regarding the subjects that fish talk about, researchers of the new study say they are to some degree the same things humans talk about: defending a food source or territory for survival, trying to attract a mate, or letting others know where they are. The lead author, Rice, adds that some of the common names for fish are based on the sounds they make, such as grunts, croakers, hogfish, squeaking catfish, trumpeters, and more.

This research is an episode in Rice’s project, which he began 20 years ago; he intends to keep tracking the discovery of sound in fish species and add them to his growing database. Also, it could help in giving researchers insight into the drivers of sound communication and how it continues to evolve over millions of years.

"This introduces sound communication to so many more groups than we ever thought," said Rice. "Fish do everything. They breathe air, they fly, they eat anything and everything—at this point, nothing would surprise me about fishes and the sounds they can make."

References

• bioone.org
• cornell.edu