Fish talk

A new Cornell study finds that fish use sound to communicate with one another much more commonly that scientists realized. Fish use sound to do many of the same things that humans do: attract a mate, defend a food source or territory, or let others know where they are.

“Fish do everything,” says lead author Aaron Rice, a researcher at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “They breathe air, they fly, they eat anything and everything – at this point, nothing would surprise me about fishes and the sounds that they can make.”

Listen to this recording of a longspine squirrelfish.