How Squid Hear: It’s All in the Motion of the Ocean

Squid can hear, scientists have confirmed. But they don’t detect the changes in pressure associated with sound waves, like we do. They have another, more primitive, technique for listening: They sense the motion generated by sound waves.

“They are detecting themselves moving back and forth with the sound wave,” said T. Aran Mooney, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He compared a squid in the ocean being jostled by a sound wave to a piece of fruit suspended in Jell-O. “If you jiggle the Jell-O, the whole block of Jell-O is moving with the fruit.”

In a study published in October in the The Journal of Experimental Biology, Mooney and his colleagues confirmed that longfin squid (Loligo pealeii), which are also a popular seafood meal, can indeed detect sound at low frequencies. Now, the researchers are working to better understand how this hearing mechanism works.

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