A few years ago, Tsunehiko Kohashi, then a postdoctoral fellow in Carlson’s lab, was sifting through old data when he noticed that this glut of identical electric waves seemed to be exhausting the listener’s brain cells. The Sounds of Electric Fish - Courtesy of Bruce Carlsonįrom the listener’s perspective, the onslaught of Baracks means receiving and processing the exact same signal over and over and over.You can listen here to get a sense of these patterns, which have been passed into an audio speaker: It’s pretty typical for several Baracks to cluster together in rapid succession the fish can’t speak in phrases or sentences, per se, but these wildly intricate trains come pretty close. (A Barack fish cannot, sadly, even say Michelle.) To communicate a more context-dependent message, such as “Get away from me” or “Let’s mate,” fish have to tinker with the frequency at which the waves pulse out: Barack-Barack-BarackBarack-Barack-Barack says something different than Barack-Barack-Barack-BarackBarackBarackBarack. But one special wave is all a fish gets, and it looks roughly the same every time: Barack Barack Barack. That voiciness alone can reveal the speaker’s age, sex, or even social status. Each individual fish says just one word-its own signature electric wave, as distinctive as the way a person says their name: Barack. These pauses might be especially useful for fish with such a limited repertoire of oratory tools. ( Brienomyrus, she said, seems to be deploying a version of the polarizing “emphasis clap” that’s found its way into so many tweets.) But titrating the amount of time that passes between the signals they send might be the next best thing. “Fish can’t yell,” Kate Allen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. Electric fish have, like the former president, mastered the art of the dramatic pause-a rhetorical trick that can help listeners cue in more strongly to what speakers have to say next, Carlson and his colleagues report in a study published today in Current Biology. Those gaps tend to occur in very particular patterns, right before fishy phrases and sentences with “high-information content” about property, say, or courtship, Carlson said. When they want to send an important message … In at least one significant way, though, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do speak a little bit like Barack Obama. Louis who studies Brienomyrus fish, told me. “It’s even simpler than Morse code,” Bruce Carlson, a biologist at Washington University in St. Their vocabulary is also quite unpresidentially poor, with each individual capable of producing just one electric wave-a unique but monotonous signal. For starters, they communicate not through a spoken language but through electrical pulses booped out by specialized organs found near the tail. In many, many ways, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do not speak at all like Barack Obama.
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