It Calls to Us
JE: 5/17/2022
It started 3 weeks ago, and we still don’t know why the fish heard it first. We can surmise that the ocean provided minimal interference with the sound waves, due to lack of landmasses, but this does not explain why the aquariums were also affected. It’s growing stronger now, I can’t stop hearing her voice.
We were told to never speak of this while we did our work but to hell with them. I don’t know if the staff will be able to last another week.
My name is Charles Merrin, I am a doctor in bioacoustics and I am writing this record detailing our research and thought processes with the hope of anyone reading to continue our work. I will try to capture everything as it happened verbatim, from the day it began, to when I was recruited, to the hell we are in now.
At approximately 1:25 PM, on April 26th 2022, the head marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Dr. Frederick Burns, received a call from the husbandry department. We were both stationed in the basement laboratory working on a local project when they called us asking to check something out. Dr. Burns put it on speaker phone and answered.
“Hello, is this Dr. Burns?," said a young sounding voice. It was probably one of those interns we hired, I thought to myself.
“Yes, this is Dr. Burns, can you please call us back later? We’re in the middle of testing”.
“Hi Dr. Burns, I apologize for calling in the middle of your assignment, but this can’t wait. We honestly don’t know what to do about this”.
“What’s going on?”
“The fish…doctor, they’re all swimming down. Like… completely vertically down, pushing against the bottom of their tanks. We’ve tried offering them food or rotating them but they just immediately go back to swimming downwards the second we let go.”
“Check the thermals, the water at the surface is probably too hot or the lights are too bright”. Burns gave me an eye roll and a shake of his head. Even I felt it was obvious.
“We thought of that, and we lowered both the lights and the temp, but the fish kept going”.
“We’ll be right up,” said Burns and abruptly hung up the phone.
“We don’t have time for this,” he huffed.
“Hey we’re on salary, we’ll get paid either way c’mon,” I told him, gesturing him up the stairs.
What we both saw was unlike anything we had ever seen. Every single tank in the institute had fish swimming downward, except for those we saw laying motionless at the bottom. Probably dead from exhaustion I thought.
“Strange” I remarked to Burns standing next to me.
“Do you think it’s some sort of problem with the water? Or an illness?” I asked.
“Could be, we have to run an autopsy on their brain, maybe run some cultures or grab a live one to check it for signs,” responded Burns.
“We should probably do that now, I think the guests are starting to get concerned,” I mentioned while looking around at the patrons. They began to converse loudly about what was going on. Their tones were a mix of awe and trepidation. I didn’t like it.
We took a look at the dead fish’s brain but there was nothing. It looked completely normal. As for the live one, which continued to swim downwards bumping against the bottom of the glass tank we had it in, it showed no physical signs of illness. There was no scraping of the gills, lesions, spots, bacteria, parasites, nothing. We even scanned them through imaging software and CT scans but found nothing. As it stood, both the dead fish and the live fish were in peak physical condition.
“Odd” sighed Burns.
“I know, I don’t see anything either,” I said, shaking my head.
We spent 3 more days studying the fish, rounding up the dead for more invasive tests but found nothing. See the attached data sets and lab results in the folder labeled “4/26/2022” for detailed findings.
The aquarium ended up closing down for “routine maintenance”. We were able to work in peace, devoting all our time to figure this out. It was 3 days after that when we received the next call.
“Dr Burns, it’s Crenshaw, please tell me you found something,” said Dr. Martha Crenshaw, director of the institute.
“We haven't, I'm sorry,” apologized Burns.
“God… well… it’s gotten worse… Now all the sea animals are swimming down. Those that are not in water, like the penguins, are clawing at the ground with their feet trying to dig their way through the ground. Some are even pecking the rock floor and damaging their beaks, please hurry doctor,” pleaded Crenshaw.
“We will, we already have all the staff with us working on the situation,” reassured Burns and hung up the phone.
“Merrin, call Long Beach, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, see if it’s just us”
“On it” I obliged and sprang for the phone across the room.
I set up a group call with all three institutes and aquariums. They all reported the same thing we were experiencing. All aquatic life, from plankton, to fry, to crustaceans, to game fish, to sea lions and sharks, were on a downward dive towards the bottom of their tanks. The crabs were digging and clawing in unison against their tanks. The sharks would trash hard toward the floor, trying to penetrate it. Sea lions would try to swipe at the floor, as if to sift through sand that wasn't there. All the sea animals were obeying invisible orders to go deeper.
Along with this, they had received calls from fishing trawlers and canneries reporting that their boats were returning completely empty handed after weeks of voyage. Did this start before the 26th? Are we just now being affected? I asked myself.
The conversation ended with the institutes all reporting that the whales they were tracking for conservation began producing abnormal patterns of whale songs. Tones they had never heard from them before, sequential clicking, whistling, and moaning, that almost sounded melodic.
I decided to make a mental note of this to check on later and relayed our conversation to Dr. Burns. You can find a transcript of the phone call within the "CA-MI Findings” folder.
“This could be a worldwide phenomenon,” remarked Burns.
“What do you make of the whale songs?” I asked.
“Probably just a coincidence Merrin, we have more important matters than whale songs to deal with, get back to the fish” said Burns dismissively.
“Alright,” I said begrudgingly.
Burns never took my field seriously. He felt that acoustics didn’t matter and instead biologists should focus on the health and constitution of the animals. Although I agree that some aspects of biology take probable precedence, I don’t agree with discounting my field. It has taught us so much about social orders and interactions between sea animals, as well as localization of species.
I’ve worked with him for some years now, he always had it out for me. I believed it was because of jealousy. I did often have a larger paycheck. However, since the promotion to head biologist, he’s gotten better.
I didn’t go back to my work on the clown fish right away. Instead, I decided to inspect the whale song recordings that San Diego sent over. I remember vividly starting up the computer in the sound room. I put on some headphones and listened closely.
Beautiful, I thought to myself when I heard them.
I had listened to whale calls and songs before during my classes in grad school, but these were significantly different. They were not calls per say. It seemed more like imitations or replies to something else. They sounded as though they had intention or a deliberate nature. It was always the same thing, the same sound or song over and over. It sounded as though they were truly singing.
While listening closely, after my third replay, I began to notice a hum or a buzzing between when the whales would stop and then begin singing again. I tried turning up the volume and was able to capture a sort of rhythm or constant tone between the starts and ends of the whale calls.
I figured they were the whales themselves continuing their songs at a relatively low volume or frequency, but at times I would catch tonal shifts or differences in the tones compared to what the whales were sounding like.
It's not them making it, I said to myself.
Upon realizing this, I swiftly fired up the lab’s digital signal processing software and isolated the parts in the recordings where I would hear this tone. I played them back to back and pieced together a track composed of basically a single frequency of sound. I put this new frequency against the sound frequency of the whale song. They were completely different.
How can this be? What is this? I pondered over and over.
I began listening to the frequency again and again on loop. I focused harder and harder, trying to decipher common links between this frequency and others I knew about. It wasn’t adding up. Could this be echolocation of some kind? An ancestor of the whale? A new species?
“Daddy”
I furrowed my brow in confusion.
That sounded like… I caught myself thinking something I knew was impossible.
I listened to the looped frequency again, checking the time stamp and file to make sure it was exactly the same one I had been listening to.
“Daddy”
My eyes widened. My stomach sank.
I heard it… good god I heard it… Michelle…, I thought as my eyes welled up with tears.
Within the frequency, I heard my daughter’s voice.
5 years have passed since I last heard from her.
5 years have passed since I laid her to rest.
On this day, she called to me.
END OF PART 1