Abstract
There is increasing interest in the potential of passive acoustics as a tool to study temporal and spatial distribution patterns, habitat use, and spawning, feeding, and predator avoidance behaviors of fishes. However, one of the primary limitations to more widespread use of passive acoustics in studies of fish ecology is the lack of well documented, and readily available, sound references. This has led to our efforts to recover and make available a digital copy of tapes of fish sounds that originally accompanied the landmark book "Sounds of Western North Atlantic Fishes" by Marie Fish and William Mowbray. They examined over 220 species from 59 families, and found biological sounds from 153 species from 36 families. The creation and distribution of a CD of fish sounds is the first step in a larger effort to rescue over 3 decades of sounds recorded at the Narragansett Marine Laboratory (Now the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island), as well as other historical data, and establish a National Archive of Fish Sounds at Cornell University. In this presentation we provide audio samples of fish sounds from the CD and present a summary of ongoing efforts to create the National Archive. For more information also see: http://www.fishecology.org/soniferous/soundposter.htm Also refer to the raw excel file containing detailed inventory data in the supplementary resources associated with this publication.