Have you ever wished you could swim like a fish? How about speak like one?

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Fish Biology, our team from the University of Victoria deciphered some of the strange and unique sounds made by different fish species along the coast of British Columbia.

Researchers have known for centuries that some fish make sounds, and the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle even mentioned fish sounds in his writings. However, our understanding of which sounds are made by which fish species is extremely limited because it is difficult to pinpoint where a sound comes from underwater.

To accurately identify which sound is made by which fish, our team deployed an underwater acoustic localization array at sites in Barkley Sound, B.C. The localization array was designed by our project collaborator, Xavier Mouy, and it allowed us to precisely triangulate sounds to specific co-ordinates.

Using this triangulation and paired underwater video recordings, we were able to tie fish sounds to the correct species. We identified more than 1,000 fish sounds during our study, and successfully tied those sounds to eight different rocky reef fish species: copper, quillback, black, canary and vermillion rockfish, as well as lingcod, pile perch and kelp greenling.

We were particularly excited to identify sounds for canary and vermillion rockfish since these species had never been documented making sounds.