Back in the 80s, a singularly ugly fish — the humming toadfish — created quite an uproar in our community. In those days, toadfish came into the bay each summer to spawn. The males would find a nice solid object, like a ferro-cement houseboat hull, and build a nest on it. Then, at sundown, they’d thrum out a mating call to attract females. With their unfortunate appearance (a toadfish makes a catfish look handsome!) they probably needed all the help they could get.
As previously reported in the Floating Times, when enough toadfish sang their serenade at once, their collective thrums reverberated throughout the floating homes, keeping people awake at night and generating wild theories about the sources of the ruckus: from secret government submarine projects to diesel generators, sound leaking from an electric cable, emanations from a nearby sewage plant, or even extraterrestrials on summer vacation!
Eventually John McCosker from San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium discovered that the culprit was the humming toadfish. But he was unable to come up with a way of squelching their love songs.
So, in the spirit of turning lemons into lemonade, some creative members of the community decided to launch a Humming Toadfish Festival to celebrate the finny sex fiends. The festival was held twice and attracted national media attention from talking heads eager to pounce on this only in Marin saga. Then in 1990 the toadfish took their act on the road, and the nighttime noise level — and the media attention — soon quieted down.
But 34 years later, the Economist recently made reference to the horny toads in an article about ocean noise: “Sometimes fish are so noisy that they are heard above water. In the 1980s houseboat owners in Sausalito, California, thought a loud hum was being produced by a secret military experiment. In reality the sound was the mating call of a male toadfish.” The full article can be read online but may require a trial subscription.