Science has long studied how animals talk to one another.
They may not have language like you and I but almost every animal on the planet has some form of communication system, sometimes these can be simple, like the bark of a dog or extremely complex like the sonar waves of a Dolphin.
Seriously dolphins are better communicators than most humans, scientists have found that dolphins can actually send a complete image via sonar, so if Terry the dolphin likes the look of a certain fish he can actually send an accurate photo of that fish to his mate Steve the dolphin, so Steve can come and help Terry to catch it.
This is the biological equivalent of humans sending each other holograms, which we can’t even do yet. So basically dolphins are the omnipotent master race and we have unknowingly been living on their planet for millions of years.
But that’s enough about our evil dolphin overlords, what about other fishy communication systems?
How about the humble herring?
Well herring are quite simply the undisputed Nobel Prize winners of underwater communication, as they use farts to talk to each other.
Speaking of Nobel Prizes, the fellow who discovered this, Dr Bob Batty at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, won the Nobel Prize, an award for research that first makes people laugh and then makes people think, for his fish fart research.
Dr Batty and two of his colleagues in Canada became enthralled by herring farts when they noticed that small gas bubbles are rapidly released from the rear of herrings every night.
So obviously they immediately dropped all their actual research and setup round-the-clock infrared video cameras and underwater microphones to monitor herrings.
They noticed that every night, when the sun goes down the herring start to break wind and they picked up very high-pitched raspberry-like noises on the microphones.
It has long been common knowledge that herring swim to the surface to take in huge amounts of air then store it in their bladder and then when they see a predator they release one huge bubble of air from their bottom to attempt to scare off the predator.
But through Bob Batty and his Canadian colleagues’ research, we now know that they do a very similar thing to talk to the rest of their shoal. What the team noticed was that the more herring that are in the tank, the more often they fart, indicating that it must be some form of communication.
The main way the herrings use their behind to communicate is to maintain order within the shoal. When herring school they do so in a perfect grid pattern with immaculately measured spacing in-between one-another. The gap left between each fish is the typical distance that a prey will jump away from the herring when it attempts to eat it.
Therefore, this grid formation allows for optimal schooling. So that’s all very well but how does a school of thousands of herring perfectly organize themselves into an immaculate grid formation?
By farting in each others faces. By releasing noxious gas from their bottom into the face of the fish behind them, they can precisely control the distance between each other and maintain their perfectly-spaced Grid.
It’s kind of like constantly farting on the train so nobody sits next to you. But these aren’t your average farts, herring rapidly release around 60 short bursts of gas from their anal duct, over approximately 6 seconds.
The resulting sound is a single, continuous burst of high-frequency noise. Scientists have named these FRTs. Which stands for, Fast Repetitive Tick sounds.
The benefit of this noise is that most other fish can’t hear this high-pitched buzzing sound, but herring can. So by only farting to communicate they are able to travel in huge schools and remain relatively undetected by predators.
In 1994 Sweden almost went to war with Russia over herring farts. The Swedish military detected an almost metallic clicking sound underwater, incredibly similar to the noise produced by Russian submarines.
Sweden went on high alert and dispatched military units to search for intruders within their waters. Sweden even wrote a letter to Russia demanding them to withdraw their submarines from their waters at once. But they quickly swept the whole thing under the rug when a Swedish scientist discovered that the sound they recorded was not enemy submarines but a school of thousands of farting Herrings.
Nature is weird and sometimes it seems like evolution has totally lost it. It’s not just herring though, human’s do some pretty strange stuff too, but no matter how weird you think you are, just remember, at least you don’t talk out of your asse.
