July 13, 2014 — In proving that mud crabs can hear, Northeastern University researcher A. Randall Hughes answered a question most scientists in her field never thought to ask.
Triggered by a layman’s question, her findings, published in a scientific journal last month, are providing new insight into the ecological community found on coral reefs.
“This project was initiated by a TV producer that we were working with who knew that some of these fish made a lot of noise,” explained Hughes, the lead researcher on the study published in the June 18 edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a journal that focuses on the biological sciences.
Rob Diaz de Villegas was documenting research that Hughes and her team were doing on the oyster reefs in Alligator Harbor, Fla., Hughes said. He became aware of the noises made by the black drum, oyster toadfish, catfish, croaker, and other fish that feed on mud crabs.
“He said, ‘Hey, can the crabs hear the fish?’ ” recalled Hughes, who works at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, but at that time was with Florida State University. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and I looked through the literature and nobody seemed to know, and that’s what launched this project.
“It drove home for me the benefits of talking about research to people outside of academia, because a bunch of us have been studying these crabs for years, and it never occurred to any of us to find out whether they were responding to the sounds that the fish made.”
Focusing on the thumb-sized mud crabs, Hughes and the team of researchers — which included her husband, fellow Northeastern assistant professor David Kimbro, and a marine acoustics specialist, David Mann — found that when exposed to the sound of various predators, the tiny invertebrates changed their eating behavior. They would forage less — presumably because they’d then be less likely to attract attention from species on the lookout for a crab dinner.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe