Just below the surface, the ocean is bursting with sound.

Wow, there's this whole thing going on underwater.

These fish are mating and they're humming and I would never know you

would never know. It's Thursday June 13th and you're listening to Science Friday

I'm Sci-Fi producer Shishana Bucksbown. I've always thought about the ocean as a

quiet and serene place, take a dip underwater, and the sounds above you just melt away.

But in reality, the ocean is quite a noisy place. Think whale songs or

echolocation, which whales and dolphins use to communicate, cephalpods can make and hear sounds too, even without ears.

And then there's the human-made noise like the giant shipping containers that crisscrossed the globe.

Here's Ira with more.

Joining me is Amarina Kingdom, science journalist and author of the book Sing Like Fish, how sound rules life underwater.

She's in Victoria, British Columbia. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much. I'm so eager to talk about this because as somebody who considers

himself close enough to a fish, I love the water. I'm a scuba diver and I want to know what inspired you to write this book.

Well, I like most humans, kind of thought that the ocean and underwater was a silent world and you know when I was a kid I remember swimming and putting my head underwater and kind of thinking that sound didn't really work there. And then I was working on a story for

Hackai magazine here in Victoria and it was about the relationship between Cleaner

wrasse and their client fish.

And so cleaner wrasse are these little tiny fish that live on various reefs and they set up

these stations where they clean larger fish and they bite parasites off of them and in exchange the larger fish doesn't eat them.

It's kind of a symbiotic relationship. And the study found that when there was motorboat noise around that that whole relationship dynamic kind of changed,

like the cleaner ass would try to take more bites or they cheat more often and the rate at which

the bigger fish caught than would change.

...