Too funny!!
Tiny bubbles? Fish may be talking
By ANNE McILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER
UPDATED AT 4:29 PM EST
Friday, Nov. 7, 2003
The sound was unmistakably rude. University of British
Columbia biologist Ben Wilson was alone in his lab late
one night with a tank full of herring when he heard what
he thought was somebody blowing a raspberry.
He worried his equipment was acting up or that his
friends were playing a joke on him. He had an
underwater microphone in the herring tank, part of an
experiment to see how they reacted to killer whale
sounds, and he turned up the volume on his speaker.
The farting sound came again, and then again over the
next few nights. It was so loud that his colleagues
down the hall complained.
"They said I was being rude."
Little did they know that Dr. Wilson was in the midst of
discovering what may turn out to be a new form of
communication between fish, one that will have
immense appeal to 10-year-old boys.
Careful observation showed the farting noises were
coming from the herring at a same time as a steady
stream of air bubbles was coming out of their hind
ends. His team dubbed the noise Fast Repetitive Tick,
or FRT, and found signs the herring may use it to
communicate. They make the noises more frequently
when there are other fish in the tank, and only at night,
when they can't see each other.
Yesterday, Dr. Wilson headed off for a month at sea off
the coast of Alaska to monitor the sounds of herring in
the wild. Herring are social, in that they travel in vast
schools with hundreds of thousands of other fish.
"I want to know if they are making these sounds in the
wild, and what on Earth it sounds like," Dr. Wilson
says.
What would it smell like? Fish farts probably aren't
stinky, Dr. Wilson says. The air bubbles come from the swim bladder, which
herring use for buoyancy. There is, however, some debate about how herring get
gas into their swim bladders. Some researchers believe it may come from their
digestive systems.
Most fish can't hear at the frequency the herring use for their FRTs, which means
they can signal each other without alerting salmon or other fish that find herring
delicious. But humans can hear it.
"If you put your ear up against the tank, you would have heard it, says Dr.
Wilson, who has a link to the sound on his Web site,
http://www.zoology.ubc.ca
{tilde}bwilson/herring.html.
He tries to find polite synonyms for fart -- including "digestive system venting"
and "burst pulse sounds." A paper published by the Royal Society in Britain on
his discovery avoided the f-word altogether.
If the herring do use the sounds to communicate, the ability must have evolved
because it helps them to survive. This means that noise pollution caused by
humans could have an impact on the health of herring populations.
Other species of fish have been known to use their swim bladders to create
grunting or buzzing sounds to attract potential sexual partners. But this is the first
time scientists have caught fish farting, says Dennis Higgs, a biologist at the
University of Windsor. "No one thought these fish made any noise at all."
Do other fish may also make farting noises? "I just don't know," Dr. Wilson says.
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 2 of 2
The Globe and Mail
07/11/2003
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...031107/UFIS...
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