Scientists at the University have found a way to pry into the private lives of fish – by looking in their ears.
By studying ear stones in fish, which act as tiny data recorders, scientists can now reveal migration patterns and even provide insights into their sex life.
Managing fish stocks in a sustainable way is a major challenge facing scientists, conservationists, policy makers and fishermen.
To get the best results, accurate information about the movements of fish in the wild is needed but gathering this information is extremely difficult.
Tiny ear stones called ‘otoliths’, which are in all bony fish, store chemical elements picked up from the surrounding water. As fish migrate, changes in the ambient water chemistry are recorded in the otoliths, but it is difficult to translate these signals into records of fish movements.
Now researchers have effectively created a translation dictionary -revealing what the different chemical elements stored in the chemical makeup of the stones can tell us about the environments fish have travelled through.
The research was carried out by Anna Sturrock, PhD student from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) supervised by Dr Ewan Hunter at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) in Lowestoft.
Clive Trueman, co-author of the study and Associate Professor in Marine Ecology at the University says:
“These otoliths can now be used like the Rosetta Stone – allowing us to read the story of fish migrations from the chemistry of their ears. We also found that sex can interfere with the chemical signals. This complicates the job of translation, but provides us with new information about the biology, and private lives, of fish at sea.”
You can read the full press release here