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When we were toddlers, we always learned that a cat says “meow,” a dog says “ruff,” and a bird says “cherp.” But recently, scientists have done heavy research on if fish really do say “blup, blup” to one another. The answer? Well, kinda. Fish use all types of ways to communicate with each other, including motion, color and even chemicals.
“The fact that some fish make noise has been known for a while,” says Xavier Mouy, a biologist at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia. But no one has been super motivated to study this subject. So this summer, Mouy and his fellow researchers are going out to record which fish is making what sound, but most importantly, why they’re making that sound.
“Of the 400 species in British Columbia’s waters, 22 are known to make sounds,” he says. “But there are probably a lot more we don’t know about.”
Researchers have found that fish communicate in two different ways, with their bones and with special sonic muscles around their swim bladder, which are connected to the digestive system. As a result, a sort of buzzing noise is produced when air is forced out the anus.
Fish communicate by…farting?! Who would have thought?
Herring tend to fart more often at night and when they are in larger groups. Lawrence Dill, at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and his colleagues won the Ig Nobel prize in 2004 for discovering these “fast repetitive ticks,” or FRTs. Dill says that herring most likely use this type of communication to keep their school together in the dark.
Mouy thinks that if we study fish communication more heavily, it could lead to a better understanding of that is going on under the water. “We want to see if we can know where the fish are and what they are doing just by listening to the ocean,” he says.