Corvina Drum Have The Loudest Mating Ritual EVER

Featured Image Credit: safarimaris.eu
By Sarah Sharkey

Corvina drum may be the loudest fish in the sea. Every year millions of these fish gather in Mexico’s Northern Gulf of California to mate.

Image Credit: fantasticfishco.com

Their mating rituals are LOUD, so loud that they cause hearing loss in marine mammals such as whales and dolphins. According to a marine scientist, Timothy Rowell, this event is one of “the loudest wildlife events found on planet Earth.”

The entire population gathers in less than 1 percent of its range for a spawning aggregation. Each individual corvine creates a sound similar to a machine gun and the sounds of millions of individual fish create a sound similar a stadium crowd.

A downside to the extremely loud noise is that they are easy prey for fishing boats. Several hundred tons of this popular fish are caught by hundreds of fishing boats every spawning season, which has scientists worried about the sustainability of this harvest.

Rowell and his colleague Brad Erisman are teaming up to ensure that these fish are around for the long haul. They used a microphone to estimate the number of fish in the congregation at around 1.5 million fish. Now they are designing a sustainable method to ensure that the population is not overfished.

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