The Australian Fish Chorus Catalogue (2005 - 2023)

A fish chorus occurs when many individual fish vocalise continuously for a prolonged period, increasing background sound levels within a characteristic frequency band. Fish choruses are thought to be produced in association with fish life functions such as breeding, feeding, and aggregation. Monitoring these biological acoustic events can provide important ecological information regarding the distribution, habitat use, reproductive behaviour, biodiversity, and in some circumstances even the local abundance of fish populations. Hundreds of fish choruses have been reported around the world since the mid-1940s; however, an effort to collate fish chorus records in a publicly accessible format has yet to be made. The Australian Fish Chorus Catalogue is an inventory of the spectrographic and audio records of 301 Australian fish choruses. These records were extracted from acoustic data recorded from 83 locations in marine and estuarine waters around Australia by the Centre for Marine Science and Technology, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Parks Australia, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Fish chorus records were collated through the manual observation and extraction of records using the Centre for Marine Science and Technology's custom-built Characterisation of Recorded Underwater Sound MATLAB toolbox and custom-written MATLAB software. The Australian Fish Chorus Catalogue is intended to be used as a reference for future studies to gain a greater understanding of how fish contribute to Australian aquatic soundscapes, to help identify fish chorus source species, and to contribute to the future monitoring and management of Australian fish populations. Future work on this catalogue will involve the inclusion of newly identified fish choruses and the classification of choruses to identify the extent of their geographic distribution.