You’re at the beach at sunset. Bands of pink and gold span the horizon and the breeze ruffles your hair. The pebbles crunch as the waves approach the shore, before the water swooshes back into the sea. In then out, in, out.
If you were to turn mermaid and head beneath the waves, you’d find everything less soothing. Sound travels further and faster underwater. So the ocean is a cacophany of pops, crackles, whistles, booms and buzzes, from raindrops, waves, ships, earthquakes, whales, fish and all manner of other animals. One, the oyster toadfish, sounds like a demented goat.
The California spiny lobster sends out bursts of harsh rattles, like somebody rasping a metal comb over a table edge. As Sheila Patek of Duke University, US, discovered, there’s more to…
