The past year saw a flurry of research documenfing a phenomenon that fishers and scientists have known for centuries: Fish are surprisingly chatty creatures. "If you think about a lot offish common names, like croakers and grunts," says Audrey Looby, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, "all those types offish are named after the sounds they make to communicate," One such creature, dubbed the pigfish, even snorts like a pig, she adds. Yet these fish have long been considered outliers, says Cornell University biologist Aaron Rice. He's one of the scientists challenging that assumption. In a study published in January 2022, Rice mapped sound-producing species onto a family tree and showed that at least 175 families of ray-finned fishes - the largest and most diverse fish group - contain a species that communicates via sound.
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