Hearing Nemo

摘要

For 20 years, Cape Coral, Fla., resident Marilyn Cicero thought she was living with a noisy ghost "It just seemed to be in the room with you!" she says. Her friend Barbara Peet, who lives two doors away in their coastal city, heard the same phantom.rnCicero describes the noise as an eerie, incessant pattern that came through the ceiling and sometimes kept her awake at night "It sounded like a bass line of a band-dum, dum, dum," she told Current Science. "But you couldn't hear it if you went outside."rnAfter much complaining by Cicero and her neighbors, the city council investigated the problem and concluded that the source of the constant booming was an electrical malfunction. But just as the council was about to allocate $47,000 for repairs, James Locascio, a graduate student in marine biology at the University of Southern Florida (USF), came forward with a startling assessment. What the residents were hearing, Locascio said, were the mating calls of a school of male black drum fish that inhabit the shallows of Cape Coral.rnCicero and her neighbors were accidental eavesdroppers on a phenomenon humans rarely hear: the chorus of chirps, ticks, and bangs that fish broadcast through the world's waterways.