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Environmental constraints drive the partitioning of the soundscape in fishes

2015; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 112; Issue: 19 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1424667112

1091-6490

Laëtitia Ruppé, Gaël Clément, Anthony Herrel, Laurent Ballesta, Thierry Décamps, Loïc Kéver, Éric Parmentier,

Animal Behavior and Reproduction

Significance More and more studies stress the potential deleterious effect of anthropogenic sounds on fish acoustic communication. Paradoxically, how the communication between fishes in a community is organized remains extremely poorly known, as studies using passive acoustic recordings are typically restricted to one or two species. At a single site, we were able to follow 16 different vertebrate sounds for 15 days. We demonstrate that the fish population can be distributed into two groups: one diurnal and one nocturnal. Most interestingly, fish calling at night do not show overlap at the level of the main calling frequency, in contrast to fish calling during the day. This shows that at night, in the absence of visual cues, sound communication is more important.