“Silent Predators No More: The Shocking Sounds of Sharks Revealed!”
Further testing is now ongoing to uncover the purpose of these shark sounds and see if this ability is unique to rig sharks, or is perhaps something all sharks are capable of. Either way, the findings have unveiled new information about one of the world’s most fascinating ocean predators and given the scientific community a new answer to the question “do sharks make noise?”
Can Sharks Make Sounds? Scientists Now Say Yes — And Have Recordings To Prove It
Between May 2021 and April 2022, Carolin Nieder, a marine biologist and Ph.D. student at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, conducted a research project focused on the hearing capabilities of several shark species.
While working with rig sharks, a species commonly found in estuaries near the coast of New Zealand, Nieder and her team noticed that the sharks would start to make crackling sounds when handled:
“At first we had no idea what it was because sharks were not supposed to make any sounds,” Nieder said, according to Scientific American. “I remember coming home and just thinking more and more about how weird those sounds were.”
As detailed in their study, now published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Nieder and her colleagues placed 10 juvenile rig sharks into tanks with sound recorders. The researchers held each shark, one at a time, for 20 seconds to gather ample recordings of the clicking sounds.
Each click lasted roughly 48 milliseconds — faster than the blink of a human eye — and occurred in frequencies ranging from 2.4 to 18.5 kilohertz. The volume of the clicks reached as loud as 156 decibels, about as loud as a balloon pop, or even a shotgun blast. Around 70 percent of these clicks were made while the shark engaged in a swaying motion.
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