Here is the
link to the NY Times story
I mentioned in class on vocalizations made by fish
using their swim bladders. The article highlights several cases in
which obnoxious noises were assumed to be anything BUT made by fish and
those who suggested fish as the culprits were called crazy! As I
mentioned the swim bladder is thought to be evolutionarily homologous to
the early lung and both develop as outpockets of the gut (in the early
stages of development). A paper by
Zheng et al., published in 2011 in PLoSONE
looks at some of the evidence for the "homolog" idea, and their results
"provide molecular evidence of the relatedness of the fish swimbladder
and mammalian lung."
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| Black drum |
Here also is
the link to some of the cool sounds fish make, including the "Barry White of the sea", the black drum.
And one more link: this one describing
research by SFSU professor Roger Bland on the vocalizations of the toadfish in SF Bay.
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Toadfish
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And one more thing about swim bladders.... Some people eat them. From Wikipedia: "In some Asian cultures, the swim bladders of certain large fishes are considered a food delicacy. In China they are known as
fish maw, 花膠/鱼鳔,
and are served in soups or stews. Swim bladders are also used in the
food industry as a source of collagen. They can be made into a strong,
water-resistant glue, or used to make
isinglass for the clarification of
beer.
Swim bladder display in a
Melaka shopping mall"
