Fish's loving express.mp3

Hearing word, unlimited fantasy. Welcome to the radio station of XXMU. We are a team, yes we can. This is《Be in English》.I’m Angel. When we meet someone we loved, we can use such words to express our heart. But, how about fish? How do they express their heart to each other? So today, I will talk about fish’s loving express for you.

This is the sound of a fish singing:Hmmmmmmmm.”

It is a male fish — a plain fin midshipman, to be exact — from the Pacific Ocean. He is singing, or humming, a love song to get female fish to come and visit the nest he built for their eggs. Scientists have wanted to know why the male plain fin midshipman sings only at night. Laboratory experiments showed that the fish's song, that low, fog-horn-like sound, is controlled partly by a hormone, melatonin. Hormones are natural substances that influence how bodies grow or develop. In the human body, melatonin tells us when it is time to sleep. It’s always remarkable how right after nightfall, if you are recording from a bunch of nests in a bay, the bay just comes alive with this sound. It's like it suddenly turns on at night...

Long ago, people thought they looked like the buttons on navy clothes. In the late spring and summer, the males move from waters deep in the ocean to more shallow waters close to land. There they build nests for females to leave their eggs under rocky shelters. Then, during the night, the males produce their sounds. Often a group of them gather together and start humming.

But how do they make these sounds?

Unlike people speaking, or birds singing, you cannot see the fish making the sound. It comes from organs inside. Their gas-filled swim bladder and their vocal muscles help them sing. And they contract those muscles at very high rates, and that vibrates the swim bladder, and that in turn generates a vibration in the surrounding water that makes the sound. They can make that sound, non-stop, for hours at a time. But once a female arrives, mating begins, and she leaves her eggs, the male stops singing for the night. It is the male that then watches over the eggs until they hatch — and the young fish can swim on their own.

Like whales and dolphins, other sea creatures, the midshipman fish make different kinds of sounds for social communication. For example, the sound they make when protecting their nests from possible invaders is different than the one they make when calling a mate. Humans and other animals are similar in certain behaviors -- in this case, the ability to produce sounds.

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