A new device made by the FishEye Collaborative has helped us identify different species of fish based on the noises they make underwater. It’s called the 360-degree Underwater Passive Acoustic Camera (or the UPAC-360) and it pinpoints the direction that sounds come from to identify which species they come from.

Before now, we had already known that coral reefs were filled with noises, such as pops, cracks, and thumps, produced by the marine life that lives there. Many fish produce these noises with a muscle called the sonic muscle that they drum against their swim bladder, or an internal pouch filled with air that fish use to float. Fish can also produce squeaks by rubbing the spines on their dorsal fins together. They make sounds for a variety of different reasons, such as signaling mates, scaring away predators, or to mark their territory.

 Researchers had never been able to tell between all of the different sounds because reefs are crowded with hundreds of different species. But now they can with the UPAC-360, a 360 degree camera that is combined with a special microphone that can tell exactly where a sound is coming from (called Spatial Audio). By combining the video and the Spatial Audio, special footage was created where a burst of color, coming from the audio recording, could be seen right in front of the fish in the 360 degree video, making it easy to tell which fish were making which sounds. This overlap of different footage has enabled researchers to identify the unique sounds made by 46 different species of fish.

This new technology will be a great help to our understanding of marine life in the future. It enables us to witness new behaviors of fish that we were previously never able to observe. Also surveying the array of sounds on the reef can help scientists tell how healthy a reef is, and what steps need to be taken to maintain a thriving reef.

Watch the video attatched, featuring 5 species of fish and their sounds:

Cites –

https://dosits.org/animals/sound-production/how-do-fish-produce-sounds/

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/new-underwater-tool-can-id-fish-from-their-sounds-46-species-so-far/

https://greenfins.net/tag/fish-feeding/