FishSounds presents a compilation of acoustic recordings and published information on sound production across all extant fish species globally. We hope this information can be used to advance research into fish behavior, passive acoustic monitoring, and human impacts on underwater soundscapes as well as serve as a public resource for anyone interested in learning more about fish sounds.
Our next major update will be to add a user system for recording and data submissions, add several other website features, and update the base dataset to include anything published since our last data update and any additional references we have discovered from prior years.
Our dataset includes information published up until December 31, 2021 in peer-reviewed articles, reports, conference proceedings, books, theses, and dissertations, among other materials. Our fish sounds information was collected using systematized methodology, with in-depth descriptions of our data collection methods available through Borealis. Sound recordings were acquired through generous donations from researchers.
Data Definitions
Definitions of the terms used on the website can be found in the table below.Use the search bars above each column to filter the table.
All the fish sounds data that is published on the website can be accessed in the form of Excel spreadsheets and individual sound files in Dataverse. Picture files can be located at their original source based on the attribution information and URL links provided near each image or in the Excel spreadsheet in Dataverse.
Information on the fish species is provided by and can be found at the FishBase website or through their R package, rfishbase. Minor edits have been made to this data set to correct typos and standardize labels. The region information for Antarctic inland waters has also been removed from all species, due to issues with data quality. Two species (Salmo trutta and Salvelinus fontinalis, Salmonidae) were incorrectly listed as native to inland Antarctica (see supplemental methods for Looby et al. 2022a) and the six other species listed by FishBase as occurring in inland Antarctica were of questionable validity. We therefore decided to temporarily remove all species occurrence records for inland Antarctica until more accurate regional data could be acquired. Other regions may have similarly miscategorized species, but they would not have as great a relative input to their respective regions and associated statistics, so we did not make attempts to correct them.
Data and Website Version History
The code used to build this website is open source and available on GitHub. It is intended to support other efforts to make acoustic research and recordings available online.