New book explores how sound rules life underwater.
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Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water
By Amorina Kingdon
Crown Publishing, hardcover, 336 pages, $39.99
In Sing Like Fish: How sound rules life under water, B.C. author Amorina Kingdon approaches a dark stretch of shoreline one evening in late May just north of Victoria.
She walks onto a public pier, puts on headphones and lowers a hydrophone the size of a film canister into the water to detect sounds otherwise inaudible to terrestrial ears.
And there it is, the clear and unmistakeable hum of the plainfin midshipman, a member of the toadfish family. Males create the sound by rubbing muscles against their swim bladders to attract females to breed.
“The grin that breaks out on my face is so wide my cheeks hurt … knowing what it means thrills me,” Kingdon writes.
We are generally aware that cetaceans such as dolphins and fish-eating killer whales employ underwater echolocation, including to hunt, communicate and navigate.
But science writer Kingdon opens our eyes to a much greater world of sounds produced by all manner of marine life. Snapping shrimp create sounds much like a ship’s propeller through cavitation bubbles. Polychaete worms crack their jaws, and fiddler crabs their claws. Beau-gregory fish grind special teeth in their throats. And herring are known to be inveterate passers of gas.
“Fish sounds— fish communications— are a window into lives,” Kingdon explains. “They can help us understand what a fish wants, and how it’s trying to get it.”
The author has an exceptional eye for detail, and a capacity for putting often-complex science into understandable language. Her passion and curiosity for unraveling the ocean’s mysteries is infectious.
“If you play birdsong slowed down, it sounds very much like whalesong, and vice versa — the same mix of tones and broadband, groans and whistles.”
Kingdon’s deep dive takes us back more than 2,000 years to the time of Greek philosopher Aristotle, who theorized that fish sounds were incidental, like that of a bird’s wings.
Today, we know that fish “hearing” is much more, based on detecting the difference in sound vibrations between small otolith stones in their heads and sensory hair cells.
Of course, there is still much we don’t know about the sounds made by marine life — and about the impact of our own actions. Naval sonar, seismic air-gun surveys and pile driving can harm marine life in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
“As a pollutant noise is hard to regulate,” Kingdon adds. “It is not visible, like plastic debris. It doesn’t linger like spilled oil … ”
Sound also travels 4 1/2 times faster in water than in air.
Shipping is another major generator of underwater noise, while posing the double threat of deadly ship-strikes to whales swimming or feeding at the water surface. Quieter engines, separation of shipping from whales and slower speeds are among the solutions.
Nature may have its own creative ways to reduce impacts. Marine researchers off Vancouver Island are studying the potential for kelp forests to help muffle underwater sounds, even as a warming ocean reduces these same forests.
The challenge is a global one, but worth the effort.
“I think the world is so much bigger than we know,” Kingdon concludes. “It’s so much stranger, and so much richer, and asking about it, looking and listening to it, learning from it, makes us fully human. It’s a priceless thing.”
Larry Pynn is a veteran environmental journalist who lives in Maple Bay on Vancouver Island. He publishes sixmountains.ca.