Fish Hearing: New Perspectives from Two ‘Senior’ Bioacousticians

Environmental noise reduces predation rate in an aquatic invertebrate

“…This can be interpreted as natural noise having high amplitude levels at low frequencies with some degree of nonlinearity at different frequencies compared to anthropogenic noise. A wide range of invertebrates have adapted to detect particle motion at frequencies below 1 KHz (Morley et al 2014), and stimuli of higher frequencies have been shown to be less relevant in other animals such as fish (Popper and Fay 1993;Fay and Popper 2012). However, nonlinearities in acoustic phenomena have been shown to increase unpredictability and result in a heightened behavioural response in meerkats (Townsend and Manser 2011;Karp et al 2014), marmots (Blumstein and Récapet 2009), and red deers (Reby and Charlton 2012).…”

Seasonal plasticity of auditory saccular sensitivity in “sneaker” type II male plainfin midshipman fish, Porichthys notatus

“…There has been much discussion regarding the appropriate sound stimuli to measure in fish hearing studies Fay 1993, 2011;Fay and Popper 2012). Sound can be measured in terms of both acoustic particle motion and pressure.…”

The Potential Overlapping Roles of the Ear and Lateral Line in Driving “Acoustic” Responses

“…Popper and Fay have had an outsized infl uence on the general fi eld of vertebrate hearing through their superb compendium of Springer-Verlag volumes, their strong individual scientifi c work, and their training and mentoring of numerous students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting researchers and, for fi sh hearing in particular, in their excellent series of review papers (Popper and Fay 1973, 1999Fay and Popper 2012 ) laying out the state of the fi eld and major research questions still to be addressed. While we are far from their status as 'senior bioacousticians' (Fay and Popper 2012 ), we wish to end this review by emulating their model and offer three suggestions where we feel the research community could helpfully progress.…”

“…While we are far from their status as 'senior bioacousticians' (Fay and Popper 2012 ), we wish to end this review by emulating their model and offer three suggestions where we feel the research community could helpfully progress. As we hope we outlined above, we are not the fi rst to suggest these research foci but by laying them out explicitly below we urge the fi eld to consider new approaches that will better elucidate how the ear and lateral line work together to form a central image in response to sound stimuli.…”