Science Friday - How The Brain Deals With Grief, Listening To Noisy Fish Sounds. May 6, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

How Grief Rewires The Brain Being a human can be a wonderful thing. We’re social creatures, craving strong bonds with family and friends. Those relationships can be the most rewarding parts of life. But having strong relationships also means the possibility of experiencing loss. Grief is one of the hardest things people go through in life. Those who have lost a loved one know the feeling of overwhelming sadness and heartache that seems to well up from the very depths of the body. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, the logical place to turn is to the source of our emotions: the brain. A new book explores the neuroscience behind this profound human experience. Ira speaks to Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, a neuroscientist, about adjusting to life after loss. This segment originally aired on February 11, 2022.   Fish Make More Noise Than You Think One of the most famous films of undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau was titled The Silent World. But when you actually stop and listen to the fishes, the world beneath the waves is a surprisingly noisy place. In a recent study published in the journal Ichthyology & Herpetology, researchers report that as many of two-thirds of the ray-finned fish families either are known to make sounds, or at least have the physical capability to do so. Some fish use specialized muscles around their buoyancy-modulating swim bladders to make noise. Others might blow bubbles out their mouths, or, in the case of herring, out their rear ends, producing “fish farts.” Still other species use ridges on their bodies to make noises similar to the way crickets do, grind their teeth, or snap a tendon to sound off. The noises serve a variety of purposes, from calling for a mate to warning off an adversary. Aaron Rice, principal ecologist in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, walks Ira through some of the unusual sounds produced by known fish around the world—and some mystery noises that they know are produced by fish, but have yet to identify. This segment originally aired on February 18, 2022.   Transcripts for these segments are available on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Being a human can be a wonderful thing. We're social creatures. We crave strong bonds with family and friends. Those relationships can be the most rewarding part of life. But having strong relationships also means experiencing loss. Grief is one of the hardest things we go through in life. If you've lost a loved one, you know that feeling. It can be an overwhelming sadness and heartache that

reaches deeply into the very core of your being. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, the logical place to turn to is our brain. A new book explores the neuroscience angle to this profound human experience. The author is my guest. Mary Frances O'Connor, PhD, author of the grieving brain based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to Science Friday. It's so nice to be here, Ira. It's so nice to have you. Let's start with some of the wordplay here, if I might. I'm inclined to use the words grief and grieving interchangeably, but they're actually different experiences, correct? That's right. I have found this to be really helpful in studying grief and grieving. Grief is that wave that just knocks you off your feet,

where grieving is how the feeling of grief changes over time without ever going away. So what I'm mean by that is that grief is a natural response to loss. And if I, you know, open a drawer, I come across a, uh, my mom's signature, say for example, 20 years after she's died, I may still dissolve into tears on that day. And yet, I know that that feeling of grief is maybe more familiar. And so it's not the same as it was 20 years earlier. But if we're expecting that we're not going to feel grief, anymore, we may start to wonder if we're actually getting any better or if we're adapting the way people are expecting us to. You said when you study grief, how long have you been studying grief? And what do you mean by studying grief? I have been studying grief for a good 22 years now.

I started in graduate school because, you know, FMRI technology was brand. knew back then. And I was absolutely intrigued. So after my dissertation, we brought people back and put them in the neuroimaging scanner for the very first study of grief from a neuroscience perspective. So this was groundbreaking stuff then. Yes. The American Journal of Psychiatry thought it was, at least. Well, when you put them in the scanner, what do you ask of them? We really struggled with, you know, how do you evoke something as deeply intense and personal as grief in such a, you know, sterile sort of hospital-like environment? And what we came up with was what people do pretty naturally. If they're going to tell you about someone who has been, you know, the love of their

life, they often open a photo album and show you photos. And so we scanned photos, individuals brought us and took words from the stories they told us about their loss and projected those onto goggles that people were wearing in the scanner. So we literally had images of what their brain was reacting to when they were each looking at individual photos of their loved lost one. which was a little unusual at the time. Usually we try to have standardized, you know, stimuli across everyone, but it is such a personal experience that felt important. Please, can you share with us what you've learned? Tell us what is going on in the brain when you look at those pictures or when we lose a loved one? You know, one of the things we realized is that grief is really complex. So it actually involves a bunch of different things that the brain is doing all at the same time.

And those include things you might expect, like memory and even things like being able to take someone else's perspective. So encoding of sort of the self and the other. But other things as well, even things like, you know, regulating our heart rate and so forth. You've just described how you show pictures to people who are getting their brain scan. And that must dredge up memories, correct? what's going on in their brain about these memories? Well, one of the interesting things is the brain is very complex, and we can actually be using two streams of information at the same time.

So you're absolutely right. One aspect is memory. We're thinking about times we spent with the loved one, maybe even seeing the loved one decline over time or being there when they passed away or getting that phone call to tell us that they have died. But interestingly, we also have to think about the bond. So in the human brain, there is a bond created when we, you know, come to be a parent or we become a spouse. That bond is very strong and comes along with some beliefs.

And one of these beliefs we have is that person is going to be there for us. No matter what, that person is there. What that leads to is these two streams of information. On the one hand, you know that they're gone, but on the other hand, it sort of feels like they're going to walk through the door again. And so that can be very confusing for people. I think it takes a long time for the brain to be able to predict. No, I'm not really going to see this person again and all the emotions and what that means

that comes along with it. So does that mean that in the brain, the brain cells has to, have to physically rewire themselves for the new reality. That's exactly right. So even in simple things, say in a mouse, if you put him in a box every day and he sees, you know, some blue Lego item, after a number of days, if you take the Lego out and you put him back in the box, there is still a ghost trace of that block. because the rat is expecting it, there are neurons that fire when he is in the area where that block

should be. Now, this persists for a number of days. But imagine for a life that is so intersected with another person. Everything we do and think and plan is involved with this other person, the brain literally has to create new wiring to understand what's happening. And that takes time. It does take time. It turns out that time is one of the most important things, but actually experience is another important thing. Something we sometimes see is that people have a lot of difficulty with grief and start avoiding situations or conversations or even people that remind them of the loved one because it's quite painful. But it turns out that kind of avoiding doesn't give our brain a chance to learn the new reality. Yeah. Grief can feel like such a physical event.

Yeah. It really can. I think it is a physical event, in part because it's physically happening in your brain. Usually when we say that, of course, we're referring to the bodily feelings. But really, those changes, for example, some work by Zoe Donaldson and University of Colorado Boulder shows that there are specific neurons in rodents that pair bond. Some of you will have heard of them called voles. There are specific neurons that are activated just when that vole is approaching their one and only. And the number of neurons increases as that bond gets stronger. And so if you think about then all the things that have to happen in order to be able to predict this person isn't going to be back.

understand what that means, it's pretty complicated and really is a physical process. Yeah, yeah. You talk on your book also about how grief can actually cause physical ailments. Well, the term the broken heart phenomena is something, you know, we think of as a metaphor, or we think about that in terms of sort of a poetic way to put what we're feeling. But we actually know from epidemiological research that that it is, true that when a person has lost their spouse, their own risk of mortality goes up. For men, it goes up twice as high than their married counterpart for the first six months. And it goes up in women as well, not quite as high. And so we know that that connection is a lot about

physiological regulation. We really, you know, being with our loved ones is extremely rewarding. and it feels safe. And so our physiology really has to live in what feels like an unsafe world for a while and try and figure out how to come back to homeostasis. Yeah, because we know that losing a loved one can be very traumatic. Yes. Do trauma and grief overlap? We used to think that grief and depression were the same thing. And sometimes we even thought grief and PTSD might be the same thing, depending on how the loved one died. But some work by Richard Bryan at University of New South Wales in Australia did neuroimaging scans of people who had a severe form of grieving. And it actually looked different from PTSD and from major depressive disorder in the brain, recruiting different parts of

the brain, recruiting the orbit of frontal cortex, when people who had this severe grief looked at pictures of people with sad faces. So knowing that there are some biological differences or neurobiological differences really reinforces what we see clinically that PTSD and grief, they are different. Hmm, that is interesting. You say in your book that many people who lose a loved one, turn to religion to help them understand what has happened and where their loved one may have gone. Is there science that backs up this connection? I think, you know, as a neuroscientist, it isn't so much that I'm trying to figure out if religious beliefs are true, but rather, what does it do for us if we have religious beliefs? So on the one hand, we know, you know, often being a

religious person comes along with having a religious community. And we know social support is really important. And we can see that in studies. The other thing that sometimes happens for folks, though, is that they get into a lot of concerns about guilt, sometimes even feeling that they are being punished for what has happened. And this can be really problematic for people in trying to understand the meaning of what they're going through. We have to take a break, but when we come back, more about how our brain processes grief with author Mary Frances O'Connor. This is Science Friday.

I am Iroflato. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with author and neuroscientist Mary Frances O'Connor about how our brains process grief. Her new book, The Grieving Brain, is out now. You can read an excerpt from the book on our website, ScienceFriday.com grieving brain. Are there medications designed to alleviate or help people cope with grief? This is a very important question. And I would say that at this point, we do not have medications. In fact, one of the things that we know is that, as I said before, major depressive disorder and even

severe forms of grieving are different things. This was really neatly. sort of elegantly explored in a study by Kathy Shear at Columbia University, where they did treatment for a severe type of grieving called prolonged grief disorder, and they also looked to see if they had major depressive disorder. So in one case, they were given just psychotherapy, targeted for grief, and then they were either given an antidepressant or not given an antidepressant. What they discovered was antidepressants were very helpful if the person had comorbid depression. We saw their depressive symptoms remit, but the antidepressant did not actually have an impact on those feelings of yearning and wishing that the person was back. That sort of that type of emotional pain was not actually helped by the antidepressant.

And that was very helpful again in helping us distinguish between these. these difficult experiences. Do you suspect, though, that when someone is grieving and it's quite obvious how much they're suffering that somebody, a psychiatrist or their physician may prescribe an antidepressant just to give them something when they don't actually need it? This is a bit of a challenge. I think, you know, there hasn't been a lot of education in medical schools, frankly, in psychology training either, about.

grief. It really is in its infancy. And so often because just as you say, doctors are empathic, they see this person, they want to give them something. Sometimes they'll prescribe an antidepressant, even sometimes when the patient says, I don't really feel depressed. But the other problem is that a lot of people who are grieving have difficulty sleeping. And so a doctor will often prescribe of a sleep medication. What we know about that is the difficulty sleeping that comes with bereavement is a temporary situation. It is incredibly difficult, but it is also temporary. And those sleep medications tend not to work well in the long run, and yet people tend to stay on them, sometimes because coming off of them is difficult. So it's more important to think about,

for example, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, what we call CBTI, which is a way of thinking about supporting the natural sleep cycle through behavioral means and enabling that person to get back into a rhythm naturally so that in the long term, they don't have these sleep difficulties. Now, your book was written pre-COVID, but it's very timely for right now, I would imagine. So how much grief is happening in the world because of this virus? I mean, has this pandemic changed how you look at grief in some ways? It has in some ways. I think there's been a lot of discussion about grief.

But what we know from evidence in the United States, some modeling done by some sociologists demonstrated that for every person who has died, there are. are about nine loved ones who remain, who are survivors. So if you think about we're getting close to, you know, a million people who have died of COVID. That's nine million people who are acutely grieving. And that's just in our country. And that's just in our country. So one of the difficulties is just understanding what it means to have such a large number of people,

but also who are all going through it at the same time. Usually when we're losing a loved one, we have people around us who aren't going through that experience that we can kind of lean on. And now we have a pretty unusual situation where, I mean, let's face it, we're dealing with a lot of types of grief, but even if we focused only on bereavement,

we're dealing with a lot of deaths. And for me, it isn't just what does that grief feel like or how many people have it. But as a grief researcher, my interest is partly in why might the pandemic circumstances be harder for people who are grieving? And that thing I said before about the brain relies on this stream of information where we've maybe seen the person decline. We may have been there at the bedside when they passed away.

We went to a funeral or a memorial service. Many of those circumstances have really changed because of social distancing. And so as I'm doing research right now, I'm talking with people who, you know, the 70-year-old woman who dropped off her fairly healthy husband who had a cough at the ER and was having some trouble breathing. And then because we're not allowed to be in the hospital with them, the next thing she knew, he was actually, she was being told that he had died. And that's a very unusual circumstance for us not to be present. People who have loved ones in long-term care experience this as well. And I think the problem is

that it doesn't give our brain a chance to understand what's happening as we're going through the experience. Yes, that I'm sure has happened many times, unfortunately. And as you say, we're experiencing, with feels like a group grief event with COVID. Do you think this might change us as a species? It's an interesting question. Certainly in the sense of a species, grief is such a universal experience. And even pandemics, right? Mass casualties.

We certainly as a species have faced difficult situations before, and we can look to some of those for important. ways that people have coped. I think it's unusual in a cultural way. Part of what we sometimes forget is that bereavement is a health disparity, right? So 65% of all the children experiencing COVID-associated loss of a caregiver are of a racial or ethnic minority. And this has always actually been true. Black Americans become widowed at much younger ages. work by Deborah Umbersome done at UT Austin showed that by the age, between the ages of 65 and 74, 25% of black Americans are widowed compared with only 15% of white Americans, right?

And so bereavement isn't affecting everyone equally. If we're thinking at a kind of public health level, we have to really make sure that the response is targeted in the way that it will do the most help. If there are people who are listening and who are grieving, what do you recommend they do to listen to pain or help them move on or find help? This is a very challenging time for people. I think it's confusing. The grief experience is not often what people are expecting. There's a lot of anger often or just the intrusive thoughts. You can't sort of stop thinking about it. much of that is actually pretty normal. And, you know, people often have the desire to talk about their experience to try to put into words what it means to know that you're not going to retire with this person, that you would plan to do that forever. So I actually recommend reaching out and

talking with the people around you, especially people who may have had their own grief experience. often there's a level of empathy there that it can be more difficult for people who don't have the same lived experience. So reaching out and talking with people and also if people are experiencing things like feeling life isn't worth living or feeling they can't get through the day without drinking a large amount of alcohol, these are really signs that it is important to reach out for professional help as well. because this is a temporary situation, and although it doesn't feel like it in the moment, it will change over time. And we want to support a person who's in that immediate part of grieving

in order to help them get onto that sort of healing, grieving trajectory. You know, the news is filled almost every day with someone else suffering a violent death, whether it's from gunshots, whether it's from murders, whatever. Is there a special kind of grief that these people, the relatives and the loved ones of these people go through that needs a special kind of treatment or counseling? We sometimes refer to this as traumatic grief, meaning that the situation itself that led to the death was a traumatic situation. And we know that violent deaths and unexpected deaths can be more problematic as people are trying to understand what has happened and what it means for

their life. Often people who've experienced a traumatic death experience more grief symptoms, but often also it comes with other things as well. Sometimes there is what we might call survivor's guilt. So depending on what the situation was, the sort of question to oneself of, why did I live when this other person did not? And that can be complicating as you're trying to come to terms with what has happened and then learn how to sort of restore a meaningful life. What research would you like to see on grief and grieving in the future? And if I gave you, I'm going to give you the sci-fri blank check question. Maybe. Maybe you. You've heard it before.

If I had a blank check, which I don't have it, to give you for spending on buying anything you'd like on the kind of research you'd like to see done that hasn't been done, how would you spend it? You know, I think there are even some really basic questions that we don't know. One is that we have a number of studies now on grief, that single snapshot in time across a number of people. What we don't have a lot of research on is actually grieving. So looking at the same person, putting the same person in the MRI scanner numerous times across that changing experience and seeing what does it look like in the brain when people are coming to terms with what has happened, restoring a meaningful life. And the second question I would want to know at the same time, we don't actually know if people who are. are psychologically having a lot of difficulty adjusting,

are the same people who are having a lot of difficulty medically adjusting. So we don't actually know yet, because these tend to be different groups of people studying them, we don't actually know if the changes physiologically are related to the changes in the brain and in the mind. And so I'd love to see more integrated work over time with people. When you say medically adjusting, what do you mean by that? Well, this gets a little bit back to what I was saying about the broken heart phenomenon earlier.

What we know is that acutely, and this is true even in animal pair bonds, some work by Oliver Bosch at University of Regensburg in Germany, has shown that when a bond is formed, it's almost like cocking a gun. so that as soon as there is separation, cortisol goes up, or the animal version of cortisol, cortisol goes up in humans upon separation and remains high. So think about that moment when you lose your kid in the mall and you can't find them, that utter panic, right? Or think about when, you know, a husband even goes on a trip out of town and you feel awful, right? As soon as that separation happens, we know there are these.

physiological changes. And we're still really trying to understand in human beings for whom do those changes happen most. Is that related to how they feel emotionally? And then are there things that we can do to help sort of support the body as it deals with this stress hormone imbalance in order to improve their experience and even improve their medical situation in that initial period of grief. Talking with Mary Frances O'Connor, PhD author of The Grieving Brain on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You told me earlier that you've been studying grief for over 20 years.

Does it get to you studying grief? This is a really common question for me. You know, I teach an undergraduate psychology of death and loss course, so 150 undergrads, you know, who say the word death probably more in that 14 weeks than they ever have in their life. And they often say to me, you know, I feel like you're too happy to be teaching this class. And I tell them, you know, the thing for me is the reason I'm happy is because I really understand the suffering. And so I have found a way in my own life from the death of my mother when I was in my mid-20s and then the death of my father, not so many years. years ago, I know what that suffering is like. And for me, it has helped me to find a lot of meaning in life.

To know that working with that one student to help them understand something is really rewarding because this is all the time we got. So I think, you know, the surprising thing is for people who have found meaning, it can be very powerful. And that is sort of an unexpected side to grieving. Well, that's about all the time we've got, Mary Francis. Thank you for taking time to be with us and for this terrific book that you've written. Thank you so much, Ira, for bringing this conversation to the radio. Mary Frances O'Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, she's based in Tucson. And if you're interested in learning more about this topic, you can read an excerpt from the book on our website,

ScienceFriday.com slash grieving brain. Just a quick heads up. Next week we'll be talking parks. Do you have a favorite park? I was blown away by Bryce. How about you? We want to hear your stories about how the outdoors has helped you recharge.

From perhaps a national park to your local city park, whatever. Park your story here on the SciFri Voxpop app or if you have a particular parks picture, share your photo with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. We have to take a short break. And when we come back, the ocean as a silent world, not so much. Listening to fish conversation.

These guys are loud. They're obnoxious. The source level on black drum calls underwater is about 165 decibels, which if you do some, you know, rough comparisons with things in air, it's about as loud as a jackhammer. We'll listen in. Lots of fish sounds. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato. For the rest of the hour, something fishy. One of undersea explorer Jacques Cust. Stowe's most famous documentaries was called The Silent World, but it turns out that below the waves it's a surprisingly noisy place, and I don't mean just whale sounds and dolphin clicks. In research published in the journal Ic Theology and Herpetology, researchers report that as many as two-thirds of the fish families within the rayfin fishes either are known to make sounds or at least have the physical ability to do so. Joining me is Aaron Rice, principal

ecologist in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the famous Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. How nice to have you. Okay. First, which fish are we talking about here? So this group, the Rayfin fish, the technical name being the Actinopteridgean fishes, pretty much encompass everything you think of as a fishy sort of fish. These are the salmon. These are goldfish. These are angel fish and butterfly fish and cichlids, pretty much everything that, you know, when you think of a fish that comes to mind. There are three groups of vertebrates known by the term fishes. You have the cartilaginous fishes, the shark skates and rays, the actinopteridgens, these rayfin fishes here,

and then the lobed fin fishes, which includes silicants, lung fish, and tetrapods. And you found what? The vast majority of them can make sounds? Yeah. So what's been exciting watching this field develop over the past, you know, 10, 15, 20 years is that historically the idea of fish using sounds to communicate had sort of been seen as this oddity, that we knew there were a handful of species that were really good at it, and they seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. And one of the things that my colleagues and I started doing was piecing this together and say, wait, we've got a species over here that does it, and there's another species over here that does it. And we step back and look at this giant pattern and found out, well, no, these aren't oddballs and these may not be the exceptions. They actually may be the rule as to how many fish are communicating. And they're communicating, of course, to talk to one another. Exactly.

And so like all other vertebrates, we see acoustic communication occurring in two different behavioral context. We have sort of reproductive context where fish are trying to find a mate. You may have males advertising for females, you know, trying to solicit them to lay eggs in a nest. And then you also have agonistic displays where fish may be doing some sort of aggressive vocalization over food or territory or a antipreditor warning. So how do you go from sound to communication? I mean, I might snore or sneeze, and that makes a sound, but it's not communicating anything except I'm sneezing. Great question. So one of the things that we see is that we have a handful of species that have been really well studied for decades. And what we know is that if we do playback sounds of male vocalizations, it immediately will attract the female. And there's been a number of cases where the role of sounds in mating behavior is both necessary and sufficient to reduce a response from the females.

And so where we have good examples in hundreds of different species, we can then begin to make this extrapolation. But one of the things, too, in terms of your comment about snoring, which isn't necessarily the same as you're talking, the other component, though, is that for many fish that are producing non-volitional sounds, things sort of not intentionally but the byproduct of another behavior, such as feeding or swimming, that still does communicate some information to eavesdropping species. So if you're snoring and we hear it, we know that you're asleep, and there is some communication. And so the idea is that any sort of sounds produced by animals may have a communication. communication. Now, that's sort of those non-intentional sounds are outside the scope of our paper. What we really wanted to focus on was those species and families that are making sounds intentionally. You know, when we make sounds intentionally like speaking, we have vocal cords. How are the fish making these sounds? This is one of the things that's so wonderful about studying a diverse group like

fish, where in contrast to the human larynx, which is the dominant source for humans communicating, fish produce sounds with all different parts of their bodies. So the most common acoustic mechanism is highly specialized muscles associated with a swim bladder in sort of the fish's thoracic cavity. So we know that the swim bladder is primarily used for buoyancy, but in many species, there are really, really well-developed muscles that connect to the swim bladder. And the swim bladder essentially is a serving as an amplifier to help radiate those sounds. We have other species of fish that are grinding their teeth.

You have the catfishes, which have ridges essentially in their shoulder girdle. And as they move their pectoral fins back and forth, they're creating a strigulatory sound, similar to how crickets and cadetids are making sounds. You have fish that are snapping tendons. You have fish that are releasing bubbles out the mouth, or in the case of herring, effectively known as fish farting, they're producing gas bubbles out the back end. I'm just stuck at the fish farting gum. It never ceases to entertain people.

Now, I understand that some of the fish you looked at, you have documentation that this fish has been observed making this noise, but others you're saying they just have the right body parts. I mean, how confident are you that they are actually using them to make noise? What we see, particularly in fish with really well-developed swim bladder muscles, where we can associate the definitive physiological or morphological experiments in a demonstrated role in acoustic communication, when we have these swim bladder muscles, really the only function that we're seeing is sound production. And so if we pull a fish out of the water or out of a glass jar and a museum and we begin dissecting it, and we see these really, really highly specialized, deep red muscles on the

swim bladder, all of this sort of inference that we have and the data across so many other species would point to the fact that these muscles are highly likely to be involved in sound production. Now, you know, I have all the same body parts to say a professional opera singer, but I don't sing opera. Sure, absolutely. Well, and this is the thing with swim bladder muscles, where the swim bladder itself, if it is only used in buoyancy, doesn't require a whole lot of intricate musculature. Whereas fish that are producing sounds with these swim bladder muscles, you know, these are some of the fastest contracting vertebrate skeletal muscles that are out there. They have highly specialized sarcoplasmic reticula. They have very specific cell structure within the muscle. You know, and so these are a group of muscles that we often refer to as super fast muscles where they stand out from so much of the other musculature in the fish. And so it's pretty

distinctive. And so, you know, if we were taking a look at, let's say, your biceps, and we just see these enormous biceps on your arms, there's a good chance that you're, you know, going to the gym, working out or some sort of an athlete as opposed to if the biceps were atrophied and significantly smaller. Okay, enough talking about fish sounds. Let's hear some of them that you brought with you today. How about I play some and you described them for it? Absolutely. Okay. Here's a hum sound produced by the plain thin midshipman. Hmm. Describe that for us. So this is a relatively simple sound and then it may not sound that interesting, but this is a sound recorded by my colleague Andy Bass and his lab on this

along the California coast. And in the rocky intertidal of the California coastline, you have these male midshipmen that occupy a nest and call for females. And while the sound itself doesn't sound that spectacular, these male fish will continue singing for over an hour nonstop. And so what's amazing to me is you have this really, really highly specialized muscle producing these sounds. And so while the acoustic display itself may not be particularly captivating, it's the sort of the underlying mechanics of it and the behavior that are just so intriguing.

And you can imagine, too, that if you're out there, you know, you have these colonies of nests pretty much next to each other scattered across the beach. And these sounds from fish, from the midshipman, would really dominate the soundscape. Okay, let's go to some hoots produced by the freshwater toad fish. Wow, tell us. This is actually one of the first species I studied when I came to Cornell many years ago. And it was one of these things where we know the toad fishes are really sort of these, these loud and obnoxious species of fish.

And so we saw this species, you know, pop up in the aquarium train. It's like, huh, we don't know anything about the species. But certainly being in upstate New York, where we don't have a lot of ocean that's readily accessible, if we could maintain a freshwater species of fish, it's certainly logistically easier. So we got it in the aquaria, put in our little hydrophone, let it record sort of overnight. And lo and behold, these really unimpressive-looking fish started. making these just really wild and crazy sounds. One of the things that's so neat about this freshwater toad fish is it has actually a completely different swim bladder structure than all of

the other toad fishes. So midshipmen, the Gulf Toadfish have these sort of heart-shaped swim bladder, but the freshwater toadish actually has two physically separated swimbladder that almost look like lungs, and it allows them to produce this sort of wild repertoire of sounds with crazy characteristics compared to closely related species. All right, let's listen to black drum sounds. Sound like right there. It did sound like a bass drum for a second. Absolutely.

These are such a great species. So these guys are loud. They're obnoxious. The source level on black drum calls underwater is about 165 decibels, which if you do some rough comparisons with things in air, it's about as loud as a jackhammer. Wow. Yeah.

And what's great is that these fish, when they produce these aggregations where males, just tons of males are calling for females. And these calls and this chorus, you know, with 165 decibel sounds, lasts for six to ten hours during the spawning season every night for months. During the summer, if you think, you know, crickets are obnoxious in the backyard, imagine this deafening sound within the soundscape. Yeah, it's almost sounds like propellers from a boat.

And it's just this, you know, one boom after another. You know, one of the things that's really been exciting in this field of bioacoustics is as the technology increases in its sophistication, we can start visualizing and listening to and understanding sounds, the natural world, in ways that were unthinkable years or decades ago. And so when we take sounds from these recordings that may be months to years in duration,

you know, and we look at six months of sound within a single window on the computer, you know, the overwhelming sound that pops out along the Atlantic Coast are these black drum choruses. They're just extremely obvious. and then if you sort of zoom in and start listening to it, it's, yep, these are distinctive sounds from these fish as they're calling during the spawning season.

If you want to see some of these noisy fish, you'll find pictures on our website, science friday.com slash fish sounds. I'm I reflato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Okay, next sound is the Bermuda sound, a bunch of fish recorded on a reef in Bermuda. and we have no idea what they are. One of the reasons why I wanted to bring this sound in particular

is this highlights the central conundrum of where we are in the field. We have really sophisticated sensors that may be the size of a water bottle that we can chuck over the side of a boat or put down when scuba diving on the seafloor, and they'll record for weeks to months to years unattended, and then we bring it back to the lab. and what we see when we record in oceans, lakes, and rivers around the world is the vast majority of biological sounds we're getting are produced by fish, but we have no idea what species they are. So we have, you know, for about a thousand of the 34,000 species of fish,

we may have some degree of focal recordings and can match species to sounds. But for the vast majority of aquatic ecosystems around the world, we know their fish sounds, but we have no idea who's producing them. So, you know, the sound in Bermuda where it is exciting. You know, coral reefs get so much attention. But when we start to get these sounds and we're sort of closing her eyes and listening, it's pretty clear there's quite a bit of activity and it immediately raises the question of, well, who's making these sounds? That particular sounds sort of sounds like pigs in a pigsty. And we can start to guess who they might be. But at this point, we really don't know. And this is where so many of these fundamental questions in the field are that, you know, sort of caused me to

get out of bed in the morning. So how do you go about figuring out what the idea? Do you put microphones in the water and just wait and watch? We use as many different approaches as we can think of. So the easiest case would be something like we can do with the midshipman or that freshwater toadfish where we can bring them into the lab. We can make them happy and healthy, put a hydrophone in the tank, and then just be patient and hope they do their thing. And in some cases, that'll work. In other cases, will be able to do sort of underwater focal recordings combined with visual observations such that we can actually be looking at a species

when it's making sounds and sort of match sounds in species that way. In other cases, we can start with looking at, you know, the morphology, the physiology, and then do some sort of like, you know, electrophysiological stimulation of the muscles and record simultaneously and sort of hear these fictive sounds that are made. You know, and in some cases, too,

then we have this level of inference where, you know, if we're recording at a certain point in time, And we're getting all these sounds and there are other supporting surveys or visual information. Well, the only thing that's there is species X. It's overwhelming sound that we're getting must be produced by that species. With 34,000 species of raven fish, there's plenty to keep us busy. I'll bet. And you know what's interesting to me is that you're at the famous Cornell Ornithology Lab, which studies what?

Bird sounds. Well, the tag line on the building is the center for birds and biodiversity. And so our lab group at the Kalesi Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, we very much encompass sort of listening to the world and all of its critters through this perspective of sound. And how come we're just hearing now? I know we've been hearing about bird sounds from Cornell for decades, but not fish sounds. You know, I have my own speculations and biases. But, you know, the idea of fish sounds, you know, it's been around since Aristotle. You know, this is a 2,000-year-old field of natural history and science.

But it's always been seen as sort of like, you know, esoteric oddball. And the number of people actually engaged in the field has, you know, been a small group of scientists. We read each other's work. You know, there's been some wonderful monographs over the decades. But now with sort of this increasing awareness of, you know, how pervasive not only biological sounds, but human sounds are in aquatic ecosystems. I think there is this increased attention of the importance of fish communicating with sound. That's quite interesting. Is it possible if I go snorkeling or scuba diving and be very quiet that I could hear some of these fish sounds?

Yep. One of my formative experiences as a grad student was snorkeling in Cape Cod when I was in Woods Hole. And as you float over the nest of a calling oyster toad fish, your entire body will vibrate. It's this just really surreal feeling where you have these fish in and among the algae. You can't see them, but you can absolutely hear them unassisted without hydrophones. And it is just a really loud sound that just resonates through your lungs, your ears, and your body. If you happen to be in someplace like Hawaii or the Western Pacific, there's a number of different damselfish species or grouper species that are making sounds that you can readily hear without the use of additional technology.

Sounds like you have a really boring job, Dr. Rice. It keeps me busy. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Great stuff. This has been so much fun. Thank you, Ira. Dr. Aaron Rice, principal ecologist in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. And that's about it for this hour. Here's Charles Berkwurst with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Danielle Dana is our executive director. Beth Rami is our controller.

Ariel Zitch is our director of audience. Annie Nero is our individual giving manager. And I'm radio director Charles Bergquist. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Charles. BJ Leidman composed our theme music. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.