Lulu Miller

Picture a frog, now melted, add a set of deranged teeth.

Luckily for this little guy, who is often called the California singing fish, it's not his looks, but his song that attracts a mate.

The way that he sings his song is by using an organ that's a little like a drum inside his chest.

It's an inflated swim bladder against which he strikes not a mallet, but a set of very powerful muscles that he vibrates faster and faster and faster and faster and faster until it releases this oomph.

Sometimes hundreds of them will gather and sing all at once in unison for over two hours.

All of their melodies and harmonics swirling together until the sound jumps dimensions.

It becomes audible above water.

And if their siren song works as well on the female fish as it does on Dr. Bass, she will follow him to the source of the sound, which is a little hideout beneath a rock that he has dug out just for her in the shallow end of the sea.

And there he will keep singing, trying to impress her, singing out his different yearnings and melodies and rhythms, impressing her with his stamina,

Now, of course, singing out into a void like this can come with a risk.

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.