Midshipman fish can hum for over an hour. “It probably is a lot more common than we realize,” Brandl said. A handful of other toadfish species have also been recorded with distinct voices. While the idea of fish having individual voices might seem surprising (Staaterman and Brandl’s study was the first to record them for this toadfish species), it may not be that rare. (Photo: Jonathan Rodemann) Right: Erica Staaterman with a baby larval snapper (Photo: Selfie) Left: Simon Brandl diving off a shore in Maine. Brandl suspects this is because he was so far away-and he called so rarely-that the other fish didn’t regard him as a threat. J did less interrupting than any other fish, and didn’t get interrupted much in turn. “He was just kind of hanging out somewhere away from the pack and doing his own little singing,” said Simon Brandl, another former Smithsonian postdoc who joined Staaterman in Panama. Because he didn’t sing his own songs as often, and his song wasn’t as similar to theirs, the other two (F and H) spent less time interrupting him and more time interrupting each other.Īnd then there was the loner, “J.” J made his home under a lone cinderblock near the docks, nearly 70 feet away from the other 13 fish. ![]() But “G,” situated between them, had a more distinctive call. Two fish (“F” and “H”) had very similar calls and frequently interrupted each other. One night, Staaterman heard a trio of adjacent fish all trying to drown each other out. Often they would interrupt each other by just grunting when one of their neighbors started to sing. But most toadfish weren’t content merely to sing their own songs. They varied the number of grunts and boops, the duration of their calls, or the spacing between grunts and boops. She likens grunting to a fish clearing its throat before it starts to show off its superior booping skills, the part of the song that’s supposed to attract females.Įach toadfish sang with its own distinct voice and style. Toadfish sing in a predictable pattern of “grunts” followed by “boops.” The grunts, according to Staaterman, are merely the warmup. Instead, the toadfish engaged in the underwater equivalent of a rap battle. However, they didn’t hear a harmonious chorus. To record toadfish calls, the team placed four hydrophones like this near toadfish burrows for six nights. “We were trying to record other stuff, but this species drowned out everything,” she said. They originally planned to map out the area’s overall “soundscape,” a collection of all the sounds of life on the reefs. Staaterman and the biologists with her didn’t set out to record toadfish. The island is home to a field station of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Staaterman journeyed to the Panamanian island of Bocas del Toro in 2016, during her work as a postdoc with MarineGEO at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “It’s kind of like a troll that lives under a bridge and sings,” said Erica Staaterman, a marine biologist who recorded individual toadfish songs in Panama for a new study published this month. By most human standards, the toadfish isn’t exactly the prettiest fish in the sea. ![]() ![]() They’re mud-colored reef dwellers, with bulging eyes, puffed-out cheeks and fleshy barbels dangling from their mouths. They don’t have the charisma of dolphins or whales. If you’ve never heard of the singing toadfish, you’re not alone. Every night off the coast of Bocas del Toro, Panama, Bocon toadfish start calling from their burrows, trying to win over females by showing off their vocal talents and drowning out the competition. The sing-off begins when the sun goes down. Male Bocon toadfish of Panama attract mates by singing in a series of “grunts” and “boops.”
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