Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) produce high frequency rasp sounds with frequency modulation

Abstract

Sablefish sounds, named rasps, were recorded at two captive facilities in British Columbia and Washington State. Rasps consisted of highly variable broadband trains of 2 to 336 ticks that lasted between 74 and 10,500 ms. The 260 rasps that were measured contained frequencies between 344 to 34,000 Hz with an average peak frequency of 3,409 Hz. The frequency structure of ticks within rasps was highly variable and included both positive and negative trends. This finding makes sablefish one of the few deep-sea fish for which sounds have been validated and described. The documentation of sablefish sounds will enable the use of passive acoustic monitoring methods in fisheries and ecological studies of this commercially important deep-sea fish.

The unexploited potential of listening to deep‐sea fish

“…Gadiformes, Ophidiiformes and Scorpaeniformes (Ali et al, 2016;Bougis & Ruivo, 1954;Fine et al, 2007Fine et al, , 2018Marshall, 1954;Marshall, 1965;Marshall, 1967;Nguyen et al, 2008;Parmentier, Bahri, et al, 2018;Riera, Rountree, Agagnier, & Juanes, 2020, Table 1). These data support the hypothesis that sound production has evolved independently and sporadically in various lineages, which is in complete accordance with data for shallow water species (Fine & Parmentier, 2015).…”

The potential of video imagery from worldwide cabled observatory networks to provide information supporting fish-stock and biodiversity assessment

“…Seafloor multiparametric cabled observatories represent a wellestablished solution for the remote and continuous monitoring of the marine environment (Favali and Beranzoli, 2006;Ruhl et al, 2011;De Leo et al, 2018;Aguzzi et al, 2019;Dañobeitia et al, 2020;Rountree et al, 2020). These permanent seafloor infrastructures host complex and multidisciplinary sets of physical, chemical, and geological sensors designed to meet the challenges of integrated and large-scale oriented basic and applied science.…”

“…In this context, ocean cabled observatories should also align their strategic planning with the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory, 2020), which call for the monitoring of essential ecosystem services, which include healthy fish stocks and sustainable fisheries. Therefore, it becomes crucial to develop standardized monitoring programmes specifically dedicated to the production of real-time biological and environmental data assisting fishery-independent stock assessments (Aguzzi et al, 2015(Aguzzi et al, , 2019Rountree et al, 2020).…”

“…The installation of video cameras on cabled instrument platforms is a breakthrough for marine ecology and associated monitoring programmes and policies (Bicknell et al, 2016;Aguzzi et al, 2019;Rountree et al, 2020). Biodiversity of megafauna can be assessed and quantified using time-lapse imaging at frequency intervals as short as minutes and for the duration of multiple year periods (Aguzzi et al, 2012(Aguzzi et al, , 2015Lelièvre et al, 2017), when video data are adequately cross-referenced with physical samples for taxonomic determination (Howell et al, 2019).…”

“…There are still technological and methodological milestones to be achieved before a network of cabled cameras can be considered as a reliable tool to track and collect biological and ecological data relevant to broad spatial scales, which is the pre-requisite to accurately infer relevant ecological indexes, such as species richness and abundance, and their possible drivers [see review by Rountree et al (2020)]. In the present paper, we outline a strategic pathway for a global effort to develop networks of key observatory infrastructures and associated technologies that are focused on economically valuable species.…”