November 20, 2018 — Every summer, a symphony of grunts, croaks and roars echoes below the surface of the western Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico to signal the launch of spotted seatrout spawning season.
Last year, the noisy process—which finds males vibrating their air bladders in hopes of attracting fertile females eager to mate—coincided with the onslaught of Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm that made landfall in Texas on August 25. And as JoAnna Klein reports for The New York Times, a series of recordings captured by microphones placed at popular spawning grounds across Aransas Bay reveals just how persistent the trout are in their pursuit of reproductive success: Not only did they spawn on the days preceding and following the storm, but also on the day the eye of the hurricane passed directly over their habitat.
“These fish are resilient and productive, even in the face of such a huge storm,” lead author Christopher Biggs, a marine ecologist from the University of Texas at Austin, says in a statement. “On land, it was complete destruction, but these fish didn’t seem disturbed.”
The researchers’ findings, published in Biology Letters earlier this month, emerged largely by chance. Biggs tells Eos’ Jenessa Duncombe that he and his colleagues initially set out to study the fish’s breeding patterns, including where and how they spawn. Trout reproduction is best observed via aural methods, as the waters these fish call home tend to be too murky for visual analysis, so the researchers set up 15 underwater recording stations between April and June 2017.
Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine