Beneath the waves
- Matthew Quinlan
- Feb 17
- 2 min read
I've been reading Amorina Kingdon's 'Sing Like Fish', an engrossing book on the sounds of sea life. It turns out life underwater is pretty noisy. Whale parents and pups chatter to stay close when visibility is poor. Individual dolphins develop individual voices and whale pods share accents. Orca communities sound different depending on what they eat; they echolocate their food and only use frequencies their prey — salmon in the Northwestern Pacific or seals in the Southern Ocean — can't hear.
"Snapping shrimp" have one beefcake, Popeye-like claw. "The shrimp can snap it closed at 97 kilometers an hour, pressurizing the water inside enough to raise its temperature to 4,000 degrees Centigrade. This flash-boils the water, shooting out a bubble that pops loud enough that it scares the shrimp's enemies and stuns its prey."
A similar flash-boiling pop comes from the leading edge of propellors on cruise ships and tankers, and it's one of the noises we bring underwater that confuses sea life and puts some fish off their food. For species that survive by eating all the time, it can be life threatening.

Two years ago, you might remember, Titan, a five-person submersible on its way to examine the wreck of the Titanic, tragically imploded under the weight of deep water. Its crew was lost, 111 years after the Titanic itself went down with 1,500 lives.
Last week the US Coast Guard released a sound recording of the moment Titan came apart.
Compare to the sinking of the Titanic itself. There was no underwater recording, no iceberg-spotting sonar to prevent it, no broadcast radio to report on it. The first anyone who wasn't onboard heard about it was in dots and dashes of Morse code. There was no sound commentary until survivors made it ashore and told their stories. No one survived Titan’s disintegration, so we have to piece together the story from the crew’s final exchanges, telemetry, and that underwater recording.
The Coast Guard picked up the sound from 900 miles away (the equivalent of a sound made in London being heard in Rome) and around 15 minutes later.

Sound travels through gas, liquid, or solid, it's just that we're optimized for gas. We don't tend to think of the sea as noisy because air pressure inside us pushes hard against water pressure outside us and our ear drums don't move much in the stand-off. But water has more tightly packed molecules than air, so sound waves travel farther and faster, which helps marine life stay connected over vast distances, play tricks, build close bonds, serenade and protect each other. Water itself is the radio and telephone and internet for 3.5 trillion fish and their aquatic housemates.
Comments