What are fish listening to?—A possible answer

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Abstract
Although all fish hear, relatively few species are known to vocalize. The biological relevance of hearing in fish is thus somewhat of an enigma. In this paper, we suggest that what fish may be listening to is ambient noise scattered from the swim bladders of nearby fish. This is in some ways analogous to the role of the visual system in most animals, where the relevant stimulus is ambient light scattered by objects rather than light emitted by luminous objects. Although the scattered noise signal is much weaker than the unscattered ambient noise signal, it was demonstrated that a relatively simple processing scheme could greatly enchance the S/N and enable a fish to detect and unambiguously localize a nearby fish from the scattered noise. The processing scheme, which relies on the nearfield properties of the scattered signal, is shown to be consistent with the known capabilities of the fish auditory system and may well explain many of them. [Work supported by ONR Code 420.]

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