Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdon: Filled with quircky and fascinating facts

Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdon (Scribe £16.99, 336pp) 

Have you ever wondered about the hearing abilities of fish? No, me neither. But science writer Amorina Kingdon has. In fact she’s devoted years to thinking about all aspects of marine sound. 

Many of us assume that sound doesn’t really work under water – like when you duck your head in a pool, sounds are distorted and faint. 

But the sea is actually alive with noise; it’s just that our ears aren’t built to hear it.

As Kingdon explains, sound travels further and faster in water. Fish can hear and marine creatures make sounds.

 Sound is critical to breeding, feeding and communication for many underwater animals. 

Even at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth, the sound of shipping is audible and the ever-increasing noise created by humans is interfering with the natural sounds of the ocean.

Interest in the qualities of sound in water has a surprisingly long history. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing around 350BC, remarked that sound is heard less distinctly in water and that whales and several types of fish make sounds. Leonardo da Vinci observed that sailors who put their ear to along tube lowered into the water were able to hear ships a considerable distance away. 

Kingdon traces the development of technology to submarines in the First World War and on to top secret underwater hydrophones – special microphones designed to work in the water – along the east coast of the US linked to onshore listening stations. SOSUS (Sound Observation and Surveillance Undersea Network) was operational throughout the Cold War and when its existence was finally declassified, its archive yielded the first recordings of humpback whale song and other marine sounds.

This portrait of the underwater sonic world, Kingdon’s first book, is crammed with similarly quirky and fascinating facts. In the mid-1980s, houseboat owners in Sausalito, California, complained about a mysterious hum that kept them awake at nights.

Was it aliens? Military experiments? No, it was the mating call of the male plainfin midshipman, a type of fish.

The song of a humpback whale can last between 8 and 20 minutes

One humpback whale can learn the song of another. A song might last eight to 20 minutes and when the whale finishes, it starts it all over again. A recital can last more than 24 hours.

 Why do they do it? We don’t know but most biologists accept that humpback whales have something that could be loosely termed ‘culture’.

The book is undoubtedly niche and it does get very ‘sciencey’ in parts. I feel Kingdon may have overestimated the lay reader’s interest in the physical mechanics of how the bottlenose dolphin echolocates. 

Occasionally the writing is clumsy. Of a previous meeting with one of her interviewees, she writes: ‘He was younger then.’ No kidding. But on the whole, I really enjoyed this deep dive into the subaquatic soundscape.