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 Ig 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 other’s 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, I’m not kidding.
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 arse,
unless your name is Donald Trump.