What resources are available to help identify common sounds from freshwater pond hydrophone recordings? I can identify a number of distinct patterns which I imagine are probably characteristic of specific species (like bird song identification)? I’d like to know what I’m listening to, and potentially then be able to compare species in various locations
2 Answers
The world of freshwater sounds is still very mysterious and not very well categorized, especially if the sounds in question are produced by insects, plants, or other non-fish sources. If the sounds in question are higher-frequency stridulations, chances are they are produced by aquatic insects. If you read some of the older papers on acoustic communication in freshwater insects, you can get some insight into what might be producing the sound in question, broadly speaking.
This is the classic text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-185X.1985.tb00714.x
Also anything by Antti Jansson. More recently, Camille Desjonqueres & co. have some good papers describing different insect species' sounds.
Hope this helps. In truth there still is not a good public database for freshwater sounds.
You could check out FishSounds.Net, which has a whole library of audio recordings and/or spectrograms of different fish (freshwater and marine). You can filter by environment (e.g. selecting only freshwater). I know that there is other life within a pond that produces acoustic signals, but this could be a good place to start.