Page 53 - Fall2020

FEATURED ARTICLE
Dick Fay and Goldfish
William A. Yost, Anthony D. Hawkins, and Arthur N. Popper
Do fish hear? What do fish hear? How do fish hear? These are questions that have been around since at least the times of Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. Whether or not fish are dis- turbed by the sounds made by fisherman has been an issue at least as far back as Issak Walton (1653; see also Rudow, 2020). However, it was not until the early 20th century that investi- gators in the United States, starting with Parker (1903) and his group and in Europe by von Frisch and his students (e.g., von Frisch, 1938), conclusively demonstrated that fishes can hear (see historical reviews by Moulton, 1963; Tavolga, 1971). These early studies and the ones that followed over many decades explored hearing in a number of different fish spe- cies and asked a range of questions, further demonstrating that fish can hear and suggesting that they could discriminate between sounds and suggesting that the goldfish (Caras- sius auratus; Jacobs and Tavolga, 1967, 1968; Enger, 1973; Tavolga, 1974) and Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua; Hawkins and Chapman, 1975) could discriminate between sounds and detect signals in the presence of masking noise.
These early studies provided information about hearing in perhaps 5 of the more than 33,000 extant fish species. However, what was lacking were in-depth investigations of hearing in fishes that would give a picture of what they could and could not do with their auditory systems in the detection and processing of sound. Nor were the data of sufficient depth on a single species to enable a compari- son between the hearing capabilities of fishes and those of terrestrial vertebrates, including humans. Such an under- standing was needed, however, to put fish hearing into the perspective of overall vertebrate hearing and to help understand the place of fishes in the evolution of hear- ing. This latter issue was of particular importance because it is clear that the auditory system of vertebrates evolved within the fishes. The basic structure of the ear and audi- tory central nervous system (CNS) is the same in fishes and humans (Popper and Fay, 1997; Fay and Popper, 2000).
There is, however, one body of literature on a single species that does provide the depth and breadth of knowledge of hearing that allows realistic comparisons
©2020 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2020.16.3.53
with other vertebrate taxa and also helps put fish hearing capabilities into an evolutionary perspective. This work focused on the goldfish, which became the “white rat” of fish hearing research. The vast majority of this work was done over almost 50 years by Richard (Dick) R. Fay (Figure 1). Before his retirement, Dick was planning on taking a broad and integrative view of all of his goldfish
Figure 1. Dick Fay enjoying a visit to a herring restaurant in Copenhagen (see nyhavnsfaergekro.dk). Top: photo of Dick with his first aquavit. Bottom: photo as reimagined by Tony Hawkins. © 2020, Anthony D. Hawkins, all rights reserved.
Volume 16, issue 3 | Fall 2020 • Acoustics Today 53