Under the sea: Fish recorded singing dawn choruses off Australia coast

Seven fish choruses have been identified by researchers

Fish cries varied from ‘foghorn’ like cries to ‘grunting’ noises (Getty)

Fish sing dawn choruses in the ocean just as birds do on land, scientists have said.

Seven fish choruses have been identified by researchers from Exeter University and Curtin University in Perth, Australia, which varied from “foghorn” cries to “grunting” noises.

Using a pair of sea-noise loggers positioned at different points in the coastal waters of Port Headland in Western Australia, scientists monitored the ocean continually for 18 months and recorded distinct choruses occurring at different times of the day, particularly at dawn and at dusk, with songs predominantly heard between early spring and late summer.

The study, led by Robert McCauley and published in the journal Bioacoustics, found the majority of this submarine soundscape was emitted through repetitive solo calls from fish, however these sounds also overlapped creating the choruses.

“You get the dusk and dawn choruses like you would with the birds in the forest,” Steve Simpson, a marine biologist at Exeter University, told the New Scientist.

The sounds included a deep “foghorn call” made by the Black Jewfish, a chorus which researchers said was comparable to the “buzzer in the Operation board game”, emitted by a species of Terapontid, and a chorus consisting of a “ba-ba-ba” call.

“Distinct diurnal patterns in the choruses were observed, associated with sunrise or sunset and in some cases, both,” the study said.

“While choruses were predominantly recorded on different days, there were at total of 80 days when more than one chorus was present at the same site.

“These choruses comprised calls of single or multiple acoustic pulses with varying pulse repetition frequencies.”

Sound plays an important role in the behavioural functions and life stages of fish, researchers said, "such as spawning, feeding, territorial disputes or distress,” and the catalogue of fish noises may help provide valuable ecological knowledge.

“These choruses help provide a context for the environmental conditions and possibly provide a complementary tool to remotely monitor marine fauna in the north-west," the study said.

Researchers said the number of recordings is growing and around 800 species of fish are believed to produce sound.

However, as sound can travel for hundreds of metres underwater, researchers have not been able to identify the precise source of each song.

“We are only just beginning to appreciate the complexity involved and still have only a crude idea of what is going on in the undersea acoustic environment,” said Mr McCauley.