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Fish Sounds Archive

This section reviews the historic work of Marie Fish, William Moubray. See especially my summary of the archive and its contents. Further biographical information on Fish and Mowbray can be found in my Listening to Fish ebook. Back in 2000 and 2001 I worked with colleagues to help rescue and archive much of their library of sounds. As a result, sounds of fishes as originally published by Fish and Mowbray in their landmark book "Sounds of Western North Atlantic Fishes: A Reference File of Underwater Biological" published in 1970, are now available from Fishbase.com and the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds. A CD was also made available to the public for a nomial fee. It can still be obtained through URI. A list of species on the CD can be downloaded here, and includes 153 of the 171 sound producing species from Table 1 of the poster presentation listed below (View Poster). Sounds for the other 18 species were not available to Fish and Mowbray at the time of the book's publication. However, if Fish and Mowbray present data on a species (spectra or oscillograms) in their book, then it is on the CD.

In addition to rescuing the material Fish and Mowbray used in their book, we also conducted a complete inventory of their library holding which included reference material from all over the world on both fishes and mammals. An excel spreadsheet "Inventory of sound tapes from the Fish and Moubray Collections - and other historic sound recordings" is available for download. All these materials were provided to the Natural Sounds Laboratory for eventual digitizing and inclusion.

I. Pilot study to inventory historic marine animal sound tape archives originally collected by Fish, Mowbray, Winn and others, and now held at the University of Rhode Island. This project was funded through a development grant by the Rhode Island Sea Grant Program.

A. Proposal - Feasibility of rescue of historic data on fish sounds compiled by the University of Rhode Island Narragansett Marine Laboratory during the 1950', 60's and 70's.

B. A summary of the inventory was recently presented as posters at two conferences:

Rountree, R.A., P.J. Perkins, R.D. Kenney, and K.R. Hinga. 2001. Sounds of Western North Atlantic Fishes: Data rescue. Poster presented at the conference: Bioacoustics of Fishes: sensory biology, behavior, and practical applications. May 30-June 2, 2001, Chicago, IL. View Poster.

Rountree, R.A., P.J. Perkins, R.D. Kenney, and K.R. Hinga. 2001. Sounds of Western North Atlantic Fishes. Poster presented at the 81st annual meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, 17th annual meeting of the American Elasmobranch Society, State College, Pennsylvania on July 5-10, 2001. View Poster.

C. My colleagues and I have published an extended abstract calling attention to the need for a National Reference Archive of Fish Sounds, and for the rescue of historic data on fish sounds.

2. I provide a glimpse of this extraordinary data by providing selected sound clips of 17 species from the archive. Sounds of 17 species of marine fishes.

This page was last modified on August 27, 2001

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