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So I was recently listening to a podcast on how whales communicate and how little we understand about it, but one interesting thing they talked about was the loudness of shipping lanes and how it affects the way whales communicate in those areas. So I wonder if understanding how these fish communicate may give us insight on environmental changes or ecological changes.
Well, in the case of whales and shipping lanes, they tend to be louder and behave differently due to the excess noise. The Mormyridae do group hunt and use their electric organ to communicate and coordinate as some studies show, but understanding these electric patterns and noticing discrepancies that we can potentially correlate to say, a change in the amount of prey or the location of feeding grounds, another one could be figuring out how CO2 saturation and deoxygenation of the water they live in affects how their brain grows and if there are any significant changes and perhaps they could be a data marker for noise effects on freshwater water fish since they communicate acoustically too.
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure, could be a lot more potential than just this or perhaps not as much.