Kieran Cox is a recent Ph.D candidate in Marine Biology at the University of Victoria, and one of the contributors to the first-of-its-kind project. He explains the crucial role sound plays in the lives of fish.

“If you go into the vast majority of bodies of water, you’re going to find that it’s very dark very quickly, there’s probably not great water clarity. Noise becomes this incredibly advantageous system to interact with, and fishes contribute to this,” he says.

“They interact, they exchange information, they find their mates, they find their homes, they find their food — all through sound.”

Here are some of the sounds researchers have captured: