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Titling a science article something like "Human Speech Traced to Talking Fish" naturally leads to certain expectations. But because science is really fucking boring, such expectations are usually dashed against the rocks pretty quickly. In this case, "talking" apparently means that::
After building a nest for his potential partner, the male midshipman fish calls to nearby females by contracting his swim bladder, the air-filled sac fish use to maintain buoyancy. The sound is a hum, something like a long-winded foghorn. Female midshipman dig it, and they only approach a male's nest if he makes this call.This, needless to say, is shite. We all knew already that various lesser critters could make noises of many kinds. An ant once crawled into your humble author's ear and it made a lot of noises--possibly involving a swim bladder--but it would be a stretch to call these noises "talking".
Still, it might be unwise not treat this latest research finding as a
sign. In 2003, a carp about to be made into gefilte fish shouted in
Hebrew that the end was nigh; an Israeli jar of carp already made into
gefilte fish called on Saddam to abandon his WMDs (by the accounts of extremely credible witnesses). So is Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell wrong in thinking that Israeli "preparations" to bomb nuclear sites are just part of a game of good cop, bad cop? We won't know for sure until someone (though obviously not a boring fucking scientist) hears it from a carp's mouth.
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