UMass Amherst Ecologists among the First to Record and Study Deep-sea Fish Noises
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Janet Lathrop from Umass Office of News and Media Relations
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AMHERST, Mass. - University of Massachusetts Amherst fish biologists have published one of the first studies of deep-sea fish sounds in more than 50 years, collected from the sea floor about 2,237 feet (682 meters) below the North Atlantic. With recording technology now more affordable, Rodney Rountree, Francis Juanes and colleagues are exploring the idea that many fish make sounds to communicate with each other, especially those that live in the perpetual dark of the deep ocean.
Though little is known at present about the significance of sounds made by deep-sea fishes, Rountree and Juanes say that if, as their pilot study suggests, these tend to be low-amplitude, then man-made noise in the oceans may turn out to be a particular problem for some important species.
Their paper appears in the new book, "Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life," from Springer Science+Business Media in its "Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology" series. It...