A black drum. Does he look like a quiet, innocent fish? Read on.

Have you ever wondered how a fish gets its name? For some fish it’s easy to tell from their appearance or behavior- check out the horse-faced loach, the flying fish, or the spotted sweetlips. However, the namesakes of some fish can be less apparent.  In the case of the black drum, considering the origin of its name can turn you on to a whole new dimension of the fish experience: the sounds they produce underwater.If you’re a Florida angler, you probably know how the black drum got its name.  In order to attract mates, these large fish produce low, booming calls by using a muscle to vibrate their swim bladder, much like musicians vibrate the taught skin of a drum.  Often, these drumming calls are loud and resonant enough to be heard in passing boats, which can alert anglers to the presence of a black drum school.

However, black drum mating calls are not always so helpful to humans—during the 2005 spawning season, residents of Cape Coral, Florida complained to the City Council of obnoxious, pounding noises “reverberating through their homes” and requested a $47,000 engineering project to fix the municipal utility system. Fortunately, James Locascio, a marine science doctoral student at University of South Florida, noticed a newspaper article about the situation and called the Council in the nick of time to identify the real culprit: an aggregation of noisy, amorous black drum.  Because black drum calls are so low and loud, they were able to travel through the water, into the ground, and into the walls of homes that border the canals in Cape Coral. As Mr. Locascio said in the New York Times article, the “nightly booming (of the black drum) is like a water drip torture that lasts for months”.  We can only hope the black drum’s romantic melodies were better received in the ears of a passing potential mate.

Who knew that fish rely on sound to express themselves just like us?

The story of the black drum is not unique. Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s “Silent World” is actually an ocean of honks, grunts (another fish that gets its name from its vocalizations), hums, and even songs representative of fish communicating.

At Sanibel Sea School, when we ask visitors not to tap on the glass of our aquariums, we always explain that sound travels 4.3 times faster underwater than it does in the air. So, why shouldn’t a fish take advantage of this and shout for the rooftops? Just not my rooftop, please.