James Locascio, a senior scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory, tells Inside Edition Digital that what the residents are hearing could be black drum fish mating.
For nearly three years, residents of a Tampa, Florida, neighborhood have been complaining about a low bass noise that is shaking their homes and disrupting their sleep at night. Theories about what's causing it are abundant. Some have questioned if it be a result of military activity, others have suggested party boats and those with their eyes on the skies have raised the theory that aliens are to blame. But one scientist says the answer may be far less exciting: it's fish.
The low frequency sound, which is sometimes accompanied by a low vibration, has bothered neighbors since 2021 and triggered noise complaints to local police, WTVT reported.
James Locascio, a senior scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory, tells Inside Edition Digital that what the residents are experiencing could be the sounds of black drum fish mating.
“I first heard about this last winter, and it was very familiar to me because people were responding to this with confusion,” he says. “They were unnerved, they were curious, but their descriptions were very similar to the descriptions people experienced in another part of Florida called Cape Coral and in Punta Gorda. Those are canal communities on Charlotte Harbor. In the wintertime, January, February, people were complaining or observing and discussing these sounds they would hear in their house at night and it was very confusing.”
Locascio was made aware of this phenomenon nearly 20 years ago when he did his dissertation on the topic of fish sound production in Cape Coral.
"We knew about the context of sound production and fish," he says. "We knew that members of the drum family were very good at doing this, that's why they're named drum [fish]. We also knew that the sounds are associated with courtship and spawning. They occur during the reproductive season and this was the reproductive season of the black drum, a species that had been documented as a sound producer in its description of its sound published.”
Locascio also says that since black drum fish are common in the area where the noises are currently happening, it further convinces him that his theory is correct.
“It's really just a work in progress and it's based on a hypothesis from previous work. I don't know that Tampa is exactly the same as Cape Coral,” he adds. “The logistics are a little different, and I'm not sure where the fish are all the time, but we'll find out what we find out.”
He says the sounds the specific species of fish are making is due to fundamental frequency.
“The frequency with the greatest concentration of acoustic energy in the black drum call is at 100 hertz, 90 to 100 hertz,” he explains. “Then there are harmonics, which are integer multiples of the fundamental. So that's very simple. If the fundamental's 100, an integer multiple is 200, 300, 400. As the harmonics go up in frequency, they have less and less energy in them.”
Locascio says that when he was researching for his dissertation, volunteers kept a journal for weeks and documented the times they felt vibrations in their home and/or heard the bass sound. He then compared those observations with the levels that recorders were reading in the water.
"They matched up pretty well. We did some other things to confirm sound was traveling through the ground into the home by multi-tracking a single sound that originated in the water. Had a geo phone on the ground, a hydrophone inside the house, and a sink full of water," he says. "You could see the sound that started out in the water, and you knew it started out in the water because the time was fractionally different.”
Locascio has offered his services and equipment to locals in Tampa, some of whom have launched a GoFundMe page to help pay for his time. It will take at least a month of data collection to prove Locascio's hypothesis, but in the meantime, he says he welcomes diversity of thought and the many theories as to what's causing the sound to continue to be discussed.
“Difference of opinions and that's great,” he says. “That's what drives ideas and helps to understand, get to the answer. I don't know how serious some of the ideas about the aliens were, but hey, I have faith. I just know what I know from what I've done.”
If the fish are confirmed to be the root of the noise, residents will be able to have peace of mind in knowing the cause, but there's little else that can be gained at that point. "If it is what it was in Cape Coral, well, back then that was the same question: ‘what do we do about it?’ Well, you embrace it," Locascio says. "You might talk to an acoustic engineer or somebody that maybe has a suggestion, but low frequency sounds are pretty hard to stop.
“It certainly isn't justified to go out and exterminate a bunch of fish because they're getting a little loud at night," he continues. "So I don't have a solution other than to look on the bright side of understanding some natural phenomenon that's happening right in your backyard. And it's a wonderful part of nature and it's a great opportunity to know more about the natural world."
