A Library for Fish Sounds

Summary

If a porkfish swims by and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? A new effort to monitor the seas by sound says, resoundingly, yes. The ocean—especially busy places such as coral reefs—can be noisy. Mantis shrimp snapping, damselfish whooping. (Listen to the music of a cacophonous reef here.) Other places have whales singing and oysters crackling. Not to mention all of that human-made noise.But so much of the ocean chatter has been difficult to parse out. Who made this whoosh or that pop? Answering these questions could provide detailed profiles of the inhabitants of particular ecosystems, and, by proxy, their ecological health.In recent years, scientists have mostly relied on visual surveys and environmental DNA to get a glimpse of ocean ecosystems. But these methods have drawbacks. A visual survey can only capture a single point in time. And environmental DNA—the genetic traces organisms leave behind—generally can’t tell researchers much about where or when the creatures it belonged to were swimming by. Sound, however, especially when paired with video tracking, could overcome these shortcomings. ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Who made this whoosh or that pop?A team of scientists at the FishEye Collaborative is deploying both in tandem to make sense of the chatter of a coral reef in Curaçao in the Caribbean. With a video camera that tracks fish using essentially 360-degree vision, and microphones to match, their system purports to be able to parse the sounds of the reef and to assign specific noises to different species of fish. They say they’ve collected the largest library of species-specific fish sounds yet. Their work was published this month in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.Paired with machine learning, the researchers suggest their system could work like smartphone apps that can identify birds by their calls. Similar efforts to use bioacoustics for conservation efforts are rolling out in all so...