- You don’t need to be big to make a lot of noise.
If you want a quiet pet, you should get an aquarium. Fish have no vocal cords and whatever other sounds they make are typically muffled by water.
Some fish, though, can be surprisingly noisy, like the black drum fish that keep a Florida town awake by having obnoxiously loud fish sex. But they’ve got nothing on what’s quite possible the loudest fish in the world.
Meet Danionella cerebrum. We’ll call it Danny for brevity.
Danny is a very small fish, growing to be only about the width of your thumbnail. Yet, it can produce a noise that’s as loud as a gunshot or a jet engine.
How could such a tiny creature make such a horrendous sound?
Well, thanks to a bunch of scientists, we now know. It turns out that the fish can flap its rib with such ridiculous force that it creates the noise.
Maybe it’s just us, but that sounds incredibly uncomfortable.
A Bizarre Fish in Every Way
If you’ve never heard of Danny — that is, D. cerebrum — you shouldn’t feel bad. Nobody on the planet had any idea the species existed until a couple of years ago.
That’s kind of hard to believe but with the noise, we digress.
Danny was discovered in small mountain streams in Myanmar in 2021. Even without being so loud, it would be a very strange fish.
First of all, Danny is tiny. At their largest, these fish grow to be a whopping half-inch long.
They’re also pretty much completely transparent, proudly showcasing their innards for the whole world to see. And then there’s their brain — or more specifically, the almost total lack of it.
Danny has the smallest known brain out of any vertebrate (when measured by brain volume). Additionally, that minuscule brain isn’t completely covered.
The skull of a Danny is wide open, as if the top half was missing.
Have you seen that dinner scene in Hannibal? It’s kind of like, just with a fish instead of Ray Liotta.
Due to their anatomy being so… Revealing, Danny fish are actually very useful for scientists. Since they have nothing to hide, researchers can observe their muscular, cellular, and brain functions so easily that Danny may end up becoming one of the best model organisms ever.
This is also probably how the scientists figured out how Danny makes its ungodly noise.
Hardcore Rib Action
Danny might be a tiny fish, but it sure makes its presence known. The fish is capable of producing a sound pulse that can reach 140 decibel in volume.
To put that into perspective, that’s about as loud or even louder than a jet engine (130-140 decibels). If you’ve ever been to a gun range, Danny makes as much noise as firing a .22 caliber firearm.
How can it be?
We can find the answer in a study published recently in the journal PNAS. It’s all because of Danny’s incredibly specialized anatomy.
Essentially, Danny has an ultra-specialized drumming system consisting of its swim bladder, a modified rib, and some cartilage. When making the noise, the fish begins by flexing a set of muscles that pull its fifth rib outward.
That sounds painful enough already, but hang in there. It gets worse.
The rib hooks onto a tailor-made notch in Danny’s cartilage, stretching it as the rib is extended. Once Danny decides it’s ready, it relaxes its muscles.
The stretched cartilage snaps back against Danny’s swim bladder, like a drumstick hitting a drum. The fish just does it a bit faster — the released cartilage reaches an acceleration 2,000 times stronger than that caused by gravity.
By everyday logic, that kind of force should probably blow Danny to pieces. According to the study, though, the fish has “genetic adaptations” in its muscles that not only allow it to withstand the cartilage snap but to perform it several times in a row.
But why does Danny produce the noise in the first place?
Well, why else? He’s trying to attract a Danielle to make some Danlets.