Science Friday - Paralysis Treatment, Protein Vaccines Advantages, How Cuba Made Five Vaccines, Fish Sounds. Feb 18, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

New Device Helps People With Paralysis Walk Again Spinal cord injuries are notoriously difficult to treat, especially for those who have been paralyzed for several years. Now, researchers have developed a new implant that is able to reverse paralysis in patients with complete spinal cord injuries. The device uses specially designed electrodes, which bring the brain back into communication with the patient’s lower body. The findings were recently published in the academic journal Nature Medicine. Ira talks with the study’s co-authors, Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon at Lausanne University Hospital, and Grégoire Courtine, professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.   Could Protein-Based Vaccines Help Close The Global Vaccination Gap? A new generation of COVID-19 vaccines are being developed and distributed around the world. They’re called recombinant-protein vaccines. But the tech is actually not at all new. In fact, It’s been used to produce hepatitis C and pertussis vaccines for decades. These protein-based vaccines have an edge over mRNA vaccines in a few ways. They’re just as effective, cheaper and simpler to manufacture, and easier to distribute. So why, two years into the pandemic, have they just started gaining traction? And can recombinant-protein vaccines help close the global coronavirus vaccination gap? Ira discusses these developments with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, the co-creator of Corbevax, a patent-free protein-based vaccine, for which she was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She’s also the co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, and a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, based in Houston, Texas.   How Cuba Developed Five COVID-19 Vaccines Cuba was able to quickly produce five coronavirus vaccines, thanks to the island’s robust biotech industry. For decades, Cuba has produced its own home-grown vaccines and distributed them to neighboring countries. But sanctions and political dynamics have complicated Cuba’s ability to distribute their COVID-19 vaccines with the world. Ira talks with Helen Yaffe, senior lecturer of economic and social history at Glasgow University, and author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World.   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.     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 Iroflato. Spinal cord injuries are notoriously difficult to treat, especially for those who have been paralyzed for several years. But now researchers have developed a new implant that is able to reverse paralysis in patients with complete spinal cord injuries. It uses specially designed electrodes which can bring the brain back into communication with the patient's lower body. The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine. Joining me now to talk more about this exciting new development are the studies co-authors Jocelyn Block, neurosurgeon at Lausanne University Hospital, and Greg Gwara Cortin, Professor of Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Block, tell me, how does this implant work? So I implant electrodes and these electrodes are located just upon the spinal cord and they are linked to a neurostimulator that is a little computer like a pacemaker that is located in the region of the abdomen in the belly and connected to the electrodes. So how does it work? So we put programs on this little computer and we studied how to mimic the activation of the spinal cord in, reality and physiologically, and we do exactly the same with the electricity. So it means that

when you walk, you generally flex your hip and then do extension and flexions on the right, on the left, and we activate the different parts of the spinal cord that are responsible for this or this function. And once the stimulation is started, the patient is able to control his legs at will. As soon as we start understanding what to stimulate, so it takes a few hours to understand the cartography, the mapping of the spinal cord, then the patient stands up and we activate the intended program to walk and immediately the patient can step. And to rebound on this question, you know, the majority of spinal cord injury, despite defined as clinically complete, are actually anatomically incomplete, are actually anatomically ink. incomplete. And what we observe, surprisingly, is that when we turn on the stimulation, the residual pathway coming from the brain that are normally silent become functional. So the stimulation will boost the residual coming from the brain and enable the modulation of the activity,

which is induced by the stimulation, as Justin pointed out. Why do you think that your stimulation works while others in the past have not been able to do this? Many groups in the past have stimulated the spinal cord to reactivate the motor circuit involving the control of leg muscle and happen there had many successes. So it is not that it did not work. What we achieve here is the development of the first purpose-built technology to activate the human spinal cord. The consequence is that it is more precise, it's more effective, and also, as Just Flynn pointed out,

It is not a continuous stimulation as the other group applied before, but it's actually modulating. So it's a patterned stimulation that aim to reproduce a natural activation of the spinal cord, as the brain would do naturally if there would be no spinal cord injury. And this is really the effective impact of the stimulation. And the patient is able to basically speak into a portable device that turns it on and then the patient can move. Exactly. So we have different programs that we adjust depending on the activity that is chosen by the patient. So for example, walking and then the patient can select the walking program and he steps. And then he can select another cycling program and we'll have a designated program for cycling. And he can have the swimming program or a standing program. And each of them have a different program. Yes, that is voice control with a watch. You know, I was watching a video of your patient, and the patient was saying, hey, look, I'm going to show you something special. And the video showed that he was able to wiggle his toes without stimulation, Dr. Caltan.

Yeah, this was an amazing moment that we had not anticipated. Now, originally, the stimulation was meant to reactivate the spiral cord and restore movement. But when you combine this stimulation with training, because the stimulation enables this high level of activity, progressively nerve fiber start growing again. And what we observed, the patient you mentioned, was David, tetraplegic for eight years, and after three months of training, was able to wringle his toe, two months later, full leg extension against the direction of gravity. After eight months, he could step independently without support, without even stimulation.

And so this was something that was surprising to you too. Yeah, that was very surprising, especially that, David was in a chronic state. So it means that he had already trained the max he could have done. And he had reached a plateau. So it was unexpected for me to see that he could improve a second time. But maybe just to precise or so, because we've now implanted nine patients. And David was belonging to the group of patients who had an incomplete injury,

meaning that there were still a bit of functioning path. He could still move a little bit of one leg and have feeling on his legs. So the last three patients had a complete lesion, meaning that there was nothing. They could not move, they had no sensations. And those were three, even if they could immediately step with the stimulation, we did not observe such a good recovery without stimulation, even with training. Yeah.

But those patients were still able to walk with the stimulation? Of course. Oh, yes. It's very different that you have a recovery without stimulation. This is ultimate grail, our ultimate goal. And as Justin pointed out, these are people with chronic spinal cord injury, up to 13 years after the occurrence of the accident. So imagine when you apply this type of intervention a few weeks after the occurrence of the accident,

when there is a huge potential for recovery. And that's one of the objectives of a future study we are preparing with Jocelyn. So the objective then is to be able to get all of the patients to be able to walk without stimulation. That would be the dream. But the objective, we are happy if people can walk. And I think with or without stimulation, I think only those who have an incomplete spinal cord injury can reach this objective. those who have a complete spinal cord injury will not be able to walk without stimulation, at least for now.

And how long does it take for patients to be up and walking again after receiving the implant? We have a new technology, purpose built with this suite of software with artificial intelligence and bark it. You know, within one day, they stand, the step. Of course, poor quality, a lot of bodyweight support, but immediately we can re-engage the spinal cord and they can train intensively. And it depends from patient to patient, you know, but after about three to four months of training,

you would observe full-weigh-bearing standing and independent stepping without anybody with support. More or less, this is a timeline we have seen so far. And when might something like this be available to everybody or more widely? So already a few years ago, with Gregor, when we were starting these clinical trials, we realized that it was quite a lot of energy for us to spend a lot of time with these patients, with this non-purpose stimulation system that was normally done for pain,

and that it would take a huge amount of energy to make it work for more than a few patients. So we knew at this time already that in order to have a treatment available for everyone, we would need to have a company working for us, a company dedicated to build this kind of devices that are easier to use, that are designed to be done for that, and that can also be reimbursed by the entrances. That's why we currently work with an onward medical.

It's now a company that is working on making devices that will be for everyone, and that's what we aim. So next step is to have a larger clinical study with more patients, and we hope that in a few years we'll have a treatment for everyone. And just to complement this, you know, onward, obtain the device breakthrough designation from the FDA. So there will be a facilitated path for onwards to have clinical trials in the US with validation of the technology. So the first aim is really to go to the United States with this therapy as early as a year from now. Are there patients for whom this device,

vice will not work? The place where I implant the electrodes is the place that should be intact the six last centimeters of the spinal cord. So the people who have a lesion very, very low located are for now, not good candidate for this therapy, but it may change. So the people who have other type of lesions that are, for example, very severe and very high, the one who cannot at all move the whole body. I mean, we don't think that the priority is working.

And there are suddenly other functions that they would like to gain before that, like moving the hands or maybe we can also take care of blood pressure problem that are very often happening when you have a very high spinal cord lesion. If I can complement here, the key for now is forced to empower people with spinal cord injury with this technology to improve all. all the neurological function that matters to them. They're still a long way to go, but this is really our goal to bring this technology

to the people in need. So this is a proof of concept. Well, it is clearly an academic proof of concept, but since we are collaborating very tightly with Onward, that has been developing the purpose-built technology for this very application, we are past the proof of concept. It is really in the implementation,

of the actual therapy. Do you think then that this discovery and the way you use, the stimulation, opens the door to other researchers that might think, hey, I'm going to see if I can try to do what they're doing and maybe speed up the process for everyone? We would love that. Indeed, we have already started a lot of conversation with research groups in United States in order to have collaboration. At this moment, we really need to expand and show that all the people.

group can apply the same type of therapy, can improve it, and we need to work together in order to make the therapy available for everyone. Dr. Coltine, Dr. Block, thank you very, very much for taking time to talk with us, and good luck to you. It was pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. And that's about all the time we have, Jocelyn Block, neurosurgeon at Luzon University Hospital,

and Gregor Kortin, Professor of Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology based in Luzon, Switzerland. And there's a great video of David and Michelle, two patients in this study, walking with the help of this stimulation device, and you can see it on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash paralysis. We have to take a quick break,

and when we come back, might older vaccine technology be the key to closing the global COVID-vaccination gap? Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm My Raphleto. India is, is going to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people with a COVID-19 vaccine that costs about a dollar a dose,

can be stored in a kitchen refrigerator, has no patent restrictions, and is a vaccine you've probably never heard of. Corbivax. Corbivax is not one of your new RNA vaccines. It's old school, a protein vaccine. These old-style protein-based vaccines have an edge over mRNA vaccines in a few important ways. cheaper and simpler to make and easier to distribute. Could they help close the global COVID vaccination gap? Joining me now is Dr. Maria Elena Batazi, the co-creator of Corbevaax, for which she was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She's also the co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine based in Houston. Baylor College has licensed the vaccine to India.

Dr. Potazi, welcome back to Science Friday. Oh, thanks, Ira. First of all, congratulations on being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Let's start off with the basics. How does a protein-based vaccine work? So the bottom line is that for our immune system to really be triggered, you really need proteins to be chopped up and presented to our immunological cells, right? for them to be able to activate antibodies, to activate cellular immunity.

So we actually just immunize directly the proteins that we, of course, make in the labs. They're synthetic. While when you use something like an RNA technology, you still want your body to process that RNA code into a protein that then that's what's presented to the immune system. So ultimately what the immune system needs to see are bits and pieces. pieces of proteins. And so we kind of jumped, you know, through all those hoops and immunized directly with proteins. And this is a methodology of, of course, you know, vaccination that's been used for many years, you know, with the hepatitis B vaccine, with the pertussis vaccine,

and others. How could protein-based vaccines help close this gap, especially in places like sub-Saharan Africa, which has a vaccination rate of what, 10 percent? So if we go through the quick checklist, right? So one, they're easily to be produced and with an ecosystem of producers already in existence, including, of course, developing country vaccine manufacturers. So easy to produce and almost illimitless quantities of production yields, right? At the same time, they are affordable because of economies of scale. So they're cheap. And countries probably can afford to buy more of these vaccines with the price of less than a couple dollars per dose. We also know that they have track record of safety.

So maybe there's also an increase in acceptance by the populations who today still are thinking about it. And more importantly, the last checkbox is it can be stored at refrigeration and doesn't require very sophisticated manipulation. and so even during the implementation may be more manageable because it fits exactly how other vaccine programs have been distributing vaccines for decades in our pediatric populations.

Yes, so you're saying it's quite familiar. How did you know that a protein-based vaccine would work on COVID-19? Ira, we've been working on coronaviruses for 10 years, so our program that started in 2011 designing prototypes for SARS and later for MERS already had evidence based on our laboratory evaluation that recombinant proteins using spike and pieces of the spike were inducing neutralizing capacity against SARS and MERS. So we predicted that they would also work for COVID-19, especially being a so closely related coronavirus. So all you had to do is basically

take the SARS virus and then switch proteins to go to COVID-19 protein and bingo. It was pretty much almost magic. You just swap out one protein for another. Correct. That's what we did. Your vaccine does not have a patent. So no one's going to be making any money on it. I mean, the big pharma companies, they're making billions on.

Why add an added complication to the mix? You know, our goal has always been open science, transfer our technologies, help build capacity, especially in the low-middle-income country regions, to teach others, you know, not only how to make our vaccines, but eventually so that they can adopt them as theirs. We gave that technology to BioE. And Corby Vax became Biological-Ease vaccine and India's vaccine and hopefully even the world's vaccine. So you went to the U.S. government.

Did you? And they didn't you? And they just turned you down. I think they, at that time of early in the pandemic, they were really hoping for a speedy technology. And as you know, RNA molecules maybe are a lot faster to be made in the lab. There's a little bit of nationalism, right? You know, in the sense that the U.S. was really interested initially in protecting the U.S. and hoping to make vaccines for the U.S. and as that many other countries that, of course, utilize, you know, the multinationals or this concept of producing vaccines, ideally for those who eventually were even able to purchase them. I think people lost the view that, you know, who was going to be able to make such large amounts of vaccines. We need more than 80% of the population to be covered, right? And I think

even still today, we need, what, more than 9 billion doses to be produced. So I think that's where we can come in and really bridge this inequity gap. So could the Corbevax vaccine have been ready early enough, given enough funding to prevent so much of the suffering and death early in the pandemic? Indeed, it could. And it could because even though we have been working with biological E, who of course co-developed and really did the hard work, of advancing production and clinical trials in India, if they could have had maybe more funding, that we could have had a lot more buy-in, political support, play in the engines of Operation War of Speed or maybe even playing in the engines of, you know, World Health Organization

or CEPI, we could have had, you know, recombinant protein vaccines readily available even before, maybe even before Delta surged. And so you think there's enough money now to be able to take the Corbavax vaccine and take enough doses of it to possibly give the billions of people in the rest of the world vaccinations? You know, I think there's a good start. As you know, we have now to face the challenges of continuous changes in the way this pandemic is looking, you know, with new variants, with the fact that there's still challenges in, you know, how you're going to have access. to supplies or gain the world regulatory approvals. As you know, India gave their authorization. Now, of course, they need to gain other regulatory agencies' approvals. But there's hope, right?

You know, for example, there's a whole Quad Alliance that involves the U.S. and India and Australia and, you know, Japan, I believe. And there's now this interest of each of them have an accountability to help. help the global access. We now have the same collaborations to bring other versions of the COVID-19 vaccines with Indonesia. And we're working with now Bangladesh. And we're also working with a consortia. And we just heard that there's an intent to produce and manufacture this vaccine in Botswana. So as you can see, it's kind of like a snowball effect. So your protein-based vaccine could be our key to ending the pandemic then.

Well, that's clearly our hope. And if all the stars align, you know, rapidly and correctly, I think we are going to be able to at least complement many other efforts of course are happening, you know, at the same time. There's other producers that are also trying to advance more of these recombinant protein type vaccines, plus the fact that we, of course, have still, you know, the RNA vaccines and some other vaccine technologies that, you know, may still. You know, may still serve and be valuable, right? I mean, I think, remember, it's not to replace or neglect the others. It's really to just, where are that problems that are still happening? Where are the inequity gaps? And how rapidly can we come and fill them? And yes, to then completely get

rid of this virus. Thank you, Dr. Botazzi for your work. And congratulations again. And thank you for coming on to talk with us today. Oh, thank you, Ira. You know, I'm one of your big fan, so it's always a pleasure to be with you. You're quite welcome. Dr. Maria Elena Batazzi, co-creator of Corbavax, a patent-free, protein-based vaccine. She is also co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and professor at the Baylor College of Medicine based in Houston. We'll now turn to Cuba, a country that's developed its own protein-based vaccines. That tried and true vaccine technology we've just been talking about.

The Cuban government was able to quickly produce five vaccines, thanks to the island's robust biotech industry. For the past several decades, Cuba has produced its own vaccines and distributed them to other needy countries. But sanctions and political dynamics have complicated Cuba's ability to distribute their highly affected COVID vaccines around the world. You don't hear much about Cuba's vaccine expertise, but you will hear about it now. Joining me now is Helen Yoffy, senior lecturer of economic and social history at Glasgow University, and author of the book, We Are Cuba, How a Revolutionary People, have survived in a post-Soviet world. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for the invites.

You're welcome. Tell us, why did Cuba decide to develop its own COVID vaccines? Well, I think that really it's two points. The first is the necessity. Cuba needs vaccines like the whole world does, but also it was going to obviously face greater obstacles than even most global South countries because of the United States blockade. And the second thing is, of course, that Cuba has the capacity. And it has the capacity because it has a well-established biotech sector. Cuba's got five different vaccines. They're all protein-based vaccines, which we spoke about earlier. What is unique about how they were developed and administered compared to other vaccines globally? They are using platforms that the Cubans have tried and tested that have proven to be very efficient and safe. The Soberana vaccines, which are produced by the Finlay Institute, which is famous for producing the world's first meningitis B vaccine in 1988. and it produces three different Soberana vaccines.

When they reach clinical trials, we could say they were the only vaccine in the world, which was what they call a conjugate vaccine, using a combination of different approaches, and based on enhancing the immune response. And how effective are they? And I understand that infants as young as two have been getting that. Yes, right. Cuba has become the first country in the world to vaccinate its infant, population from two years old. All of their vaccines have shown efficacy of over 90%. The childhood group from two to five, using the Soberana vaccines demonstrated the highest efficacy of something

like 98 to 99%. Wow. You know, one of the criticisms about Cuba is that, well, they don't publish their results in medical journals. Should that raise alarms about their efficacy? They have just had an article published in vaccines, which is one of the very big journals. The sort of top scientists involved in this have explained that they have had faced some obstacles and unusual delays in getting their work published. So it's not that they haven't submitted their papers to globally accepted peer-reviewed journals. It's not clear why there are those delays. It may well be because of the intensification.

of sanctions under the Trump administration. And what people need to understand is that these also target things like scientific exchange and, you know, collaborations. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I know that over 90% of Cubans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Why hasn't there been the same level of vaccine hesitancy there that we see here and elsewhere? Cuba was a country 60 years ago, which was riddled.

with diseases and they invested very heavily in their public health care system and their medical science system. And since then, they've eliminated six diseases. They have a childhood vaccination program which protects all Cubans against 13 diseases with 11 vaccines. Eight of them are produced domestically. So there is a great deal of confidence and pride, I think you can say, in the medical science capacity of the nation because it's very much a product of, you know, the development strategy pursued post-1959 under the socialist state. And the hesitancy that we see in other countries, a lot of that is to do with the fact that they don't quite trust these companies that have rolled out vaccines, particularly those using revolutionary technology,

not really tried and tested. But also, these are companies that are essentially motivated by profit. they've made huge fortunes during the process of the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think that breeds skepticism. Now, none of those issues are relevant in Cuba. The public health care system is integrally linked to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. And, you know, they're all state-owned. There are no private interests and no speculators making huge fortunes out of this global health crisis. That's really interesting.

Cuban vaccines have yet to be approved by. World Health Organization, why has there been such a backlog between the vaccine's deployment in Cuba and this approval process? The approval process is extremely comprehensive and requires, as they put it, First World Standards. So it's not just judgment on the efficacy results and safety results, but they're also judging the laboratories, the capacity for industrial production and so on. And that's where Cuba has struggled. Rather than submitting an application that could get rejected on the basis of the resources they work with, they have made a lot of investments, spent a lot of time in revamping a new laboratory. Other countries don't need to wait for the World Health Organization

to approve the Cuban vaccines. So they are already exporting their vaccines to at least four countries. They've donated vaccines to other countries. And they are currently in talks with another 20 countries about either exporting the vaccine or the technology to produce it. What's at stake if those who have received the Cuban vaccines aren't considered fully vaccinated by countries like the US and the UK? If Cuba really does start to export possibly hundreds of millions of doses of their vaccine to the global south, it will become a really big obstacle for global mobility if the Cuban vaccine is not recognized as one of the vaccines that are accepted for international travel.

The notion, I think, is that when the World Health Organization approves the Cuban vaccine, it makes the process of national authorities recognizing that vaccine much quicker and much easier. Helen Yoppy, Senior Lecture of Economics and Social History at Glasgow University and author of the book, We Are Cuba, How a Revolutionary People have survived a post- Soviet world. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much. We have to take a short break and when we come back, the ocean as a silent world, not so much. 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 Cousteau's most famous documentaries was called The Silent World. But it turns out that below the way, 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 fishes, 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 include silicants, lungfish, 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 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 contexts. 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 anti-preditor 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 by 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 communicative function. 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 fording 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, you know, 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 in 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 as 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 muscles. 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 describe them for it? Absolutely. Okay. Here's a hum sound produced by the plain thin,

Midshipman. Describe that for it. So this is, you know, a relatively simple sound, and it may not sound that interesting. But this is a sound recorded by my colleague Andy Bass in 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 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.

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 loud and obnoxious species of fish. And so we saw this species pop up in the aquarium trade. 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 swimbladder structure than all of the other toadfishes. So midshipmen, the Gulf Toadfish have these sort of heart-shaped swim bladder. But the freshwater toadfish actually has two physically separated swim bladders 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, you know, 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, if 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 it 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, you know, maybe 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 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, Coral reefs get so much attention, but when we start to get these sounds and we're sort of closing our 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 and 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,

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, we'll be able to do sort of underwater focal recordings

with combined with visual observations such that we can actually be looking at a species when it's making sounds and sort of match sounds and species that way. In other cases, we can start with looking at the morphology of the physiology and then do some sort of like electrophysiological stimulation of the muscles and record simultaneously and sort of hear these fictive sounds that are made. And in some cases, too, then we have this level of inference where 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,

says, 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 that's the Center for Birds and biodiversity. And so our lab group at the K-Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, we very much compass sort of listening to the world and all of its critters through this perspective of sound. And how come we're just hearing now? 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 2000-year-old field of natural history and science, but it's always been seen as this sort of like, you know, esoteric oddball and the number of people actually engage. 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 know, 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 group or 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. Wright. 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 week. If you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Or you can email us the old-fashioned

way, SciFri at ScienceFriady.com. Please send us feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.