Properties of Fish Sound by White-edged Rockfish (Sebastes taczanowskii)

Abstract

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has been introduced to monitor rockfish populations and distributions. We conducted water tank experiments to determine whether the white-edged rockfish (Sebastes taczanowskii) is soniferous and to confirm whether its sound properties are appropriate to adopt the PAM method. We observed two types of sound production by white-edged rockfish. The pulse durations of the Type 1 and Type 2 sounds were 0.017±0.003 s and 0.071±0.034 s, respectively, and their peak frequencies were 456.0±54.9 Hz and 116.3±28.1 Hz. These results suggest that white-edged rockfish produce sounds specific to their species and that it would therefore be possible to estimate the fish population by PAM.