Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #587

Mysterious Bass Sounds Irking Florida Residents Might Just Be Fish Mating Loudly
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP3T0aHDP6Y
By Sarah Kuta
A strange noise is keeping Tampa, Florida, residents up at night. The thrumming is so loud that, at times, it sends tremors through their homes.
Now, a local sci- entist has come up with one pos- sible explanation for the disruption: mating fish. As it turns out, resi- dents might be eavesdropping on black drum fish as they repro- duce, reports Fox 13’s Jordan
Bowen. The ani- mals can produce low frequency drumming sounds by flexing their muscles against their swim blad- der.
Black drum fish tend to mate— and fill the sea with
their amorous racket—on winter nights, which might explain the uptick in noise residents hear around this time of year.
Popular among anglers, black drum fish
(Pogonias cromis) can grow more than 5.5 feet long. They have large gray or black scales and bar- bels protruding from their lower jaws, and they chow down on fish, shellfish, crabs, shrimp, mussels and vari- ous invertebrates with their powerful teeth. The bot- tom-dwellers typi- cally inhabit lagoons, river mouths and bays, though they also live offshore.
Tampa’s mysteri- ous sounds date
back to at least 2021. Since then, residents have come up with a variety of theories for the persistent hum—maybe it stems from a nearby Air Force base, or maybe a party boat has been blasting a bass beat with impressive speak- ers. They also wondered if con- struction opera- tions were to blame.
Over time, how- ever, community members got so fed up with the incessant thrum- ming that they decided to do something about it. South Tampa resident Sara Healy is now leading the charge to figure out where the sounds are com- ing from.
She’s raising money on GoFundMe to support an inves- tigation led by sci- entist James Locascio, the pro- gram manager for fisheries habitat ecology and acoustics at Mote Marine Laboratory &
Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida.
Now that resi- dents have raised enough cash— $2,500 to start— Locascio has agreed to place microphones underwater for two months to see what he can find out. The group met its fundraising goal earlier this week, and Locascio is now searching for potential sites to install the recorders.
Locascio is the leading proponent of the black drum fish theory, based on past research he conducted for his dissertation nearly two decades ago in southwest Florida.
“They used to call it the Punta Gorda growl in the 1970s,” he tells WFTS’s Erik Waxler. “So, down there, it’s been going on or known about for a long time.”
It’s unusual for underwater sounds to travel
through the air. But the black drum fish noises could be making their way to peo- ple’s homes via tunnels or the ground, reports the Washington Post’s Kyle Melnick. It’s also possible the black drum fish popula- tion in Tampa Bay has ballooned recently, for some unknown reason.
“It’s a low fre- quency sound, and so they travel much better and go farther dis- tances, and they go through dis- similar media more efficiently,” Locascio tells Fox 13.
If it turns out that fish are to blame for all the sleep- less nights, resi- dents will likely have little choice but to don earplugs, hunker down and wait out the rest of the mating season.
“Well, it’s nature,” Healy says to
the Washington Post. “There’s nothing to be done.”
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine