A sound worth saving: acoustic characteristics of a massive fish spawning aggregation

Abstract

Group choruses of marine animals can produce extraordinarily loud sounds that markedly elevate levels of the ambient soundscape. We investigated sound production in the Gulf corvina (), a soniferous marine fish with a unique reproductive behaviour threatened by overfishing, to compare with sounds produced by other marine animals. We coupled echosounder and hydrophone surveys to estimate the magnitude of the aggregation and sounds produced during spawning. We characterized individual calls and documented changes in the soundscape generated by the presence of as many as 1.5 million corvina within a spawning aggregation spanning distances up to 27 km. We show that calls by male corvina represent the loudest sounds recorded in a marine fish, and the spatio-temporal magnitude of their collective choruses are among the loudest animal sounds recorded in aquatic environments. While this wildlife spectacle is at great risk of disappearing due to overfishing, regional conservation efforts are focused on other endangered marine animals.

Sound production in the Meagre,Argyrosomus regius(Asso, 1801): intraspecific variability associated with size, sex and context

“…This variation in sound parameters may be valuable to fisheries biologists monitor natural populations of meagre with passive acoustic monitoring. For example, these differences could be used to detect meagre in the field and further attempt to ascertain ontogenetic phase (Sprague & Luczkovich, 2001), or to chart temporal and spatial patterns of meagre reproduction through the detection of spawning sounds as in other sciaenids (Connaughton & Taylor, 1995;Luczkovich et al, 1999;Luczkovich et al, 2008;Rowell et al, 2017). Further research to confirm differences between sex and ascertain the influence of other sources of variability such as water temperature could be valuable for such passive acoustic monitoring.…”

“…Acoustic variability is mainly related to behavioural functions, such as courtship, spawning, agonistic behaviour, competitive feeding, and disturbance (Amorim, 2006;Ladich & Myrberg, 2006). This inter-and intra-specific variability of fish sounds is useful to ascertain the presence, identity and activity of fish in nature (e.g., Borie et al, 2014;Erisman & Rowell, 2017).…”

Diurnal variation in freshwater ecoacoustics: Implications for site‐level sampling design

“…Acoustic single species monitoring has been used extensively in terrestrial systems to track trajectories of endangered birds (Grava, Mathevon, Place, & Balluet, 2008;Holmes, McIlwrick, & Venier, 2014), bats (Murray & Kurta, 2004), and anurans (Willacy, Mahony, & Newell, 2015). In the marine realm, apart from applications in cetacean research and conservation (Klinck et al, 2012;Mellinger et al, 2007), acoustic monitoring has also been applied to fish (Erisman & Rowell, 2017;Hernandez et al, 2013) and could potentially be used to survey crustacea, such as spiny lobsters and mantis shrimp (Staaterman, 2016). In freshwater systems, single species monitoring has been used to automate detection of spawning events (Straight, Freeman, & Freeman, 2014) but also to detect presence of invasive fish such as Tilapia (Kottege, Jurdak, Kroon, & Jones, 2015).…”

Mapping Fish Chorus Distributions in Southern California Using an Autonomous Wave Glider

“…Although the Wave Glider generates mostly low-frequency noise, the source level of low-frequency humpback whale vocalizations is high enough to enable the use of a Wave Glider to study the whale's acoustic behavior (Wiggins et al, 2010;Bingham et al, 2012). Soniferous fish, however, typically produce low-frequency sounds at source levels similar to or lower than marine mammals (Erisman and Rowell, 2017), making it a more challenging signal-to-noise environment for a Wave Glider to operate in.…”