Lulu Miller
speaker
3,713 appearances
28 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 18 Sep
Lulu Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
You make yourself known.
Wow.
But it can also sometimes come with a reward.
If the female likes what she hears, she will swim deeper into the cave, turn upside down, and one by one begin depositing her eggs on the underside of the rock.
Oh, like helping her to distribute them?
This delicate scene lasts about 24 hours, and then the female fish swims away.
In this species, it is the male that tends to the children, to the babies until they are hatched for weeks.
Over the decades, Dr. Bass has made dozens of incredible discoveries about these fish, how they sing and why they sing and how the circuits in their brain that let them sing look eerily similar to the ones in our brain that let us talk.
But none of that is why I called Dr. Bass, because in the 1980s, he made a discovery that, to me, is far wilder, something he never expected to see, which is that inside this chorus of blustery singing males, there is a second type of male, a male that lacks the musculature to sing, a silent male.
When I first heard about this little guy, I fell in love.
This little slice of quiet in the din, I felt so much affection for him because it seemed to me he had found a way to articulate the value of silence.
He's not a fluke in the gene pool.
In some populations, up to one in every 10 males is anatomically silent.
And so I wondered, there must be something about him that allows him to persist, something that the female is choosing over these vocalizing counterpoints.
I pictured a fin, something that was gorgeous but invisible to most, but through negative space looked like prize or attribute to some.
These are all fancy words for saying I am so sick of words.
Does anyone else feel that?
The more I use them for a living, the more I have come to mistrust them, that they are just these noisy puffs of hot air, laden not only with anger and violence and insecurity, but so many untruths.
That despite the etymology of communication, meaning to share, that words are distancing.
As I sink, I should have a better word for sink.
Showing 3041–3060 of 3,713 · page 153 of 186
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