'Tis the voice of the Midshipmen

’Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare,
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.
--Lewis Carroll

Midshipmen at the Naval Academy probably get annoyingly noisy occasionally, fired up by androgen hormones, compulsively showing off, singing off-key and strumming guitars -- in any way possible trying to attract dates.  (I merely conjecture.)  But now their namesakes, the midshipman fish, are being blamed for vocalizing so noisily that it's annoying the good people of West Seattle.

The midshipman fish, of which fourteen separate species have been identified in the Porichthys genus, are known for their vocalizations.  Their name comes from luminous spots (photophores) which someone, sometime, fancifully thought resembled the buttons on a midshipman's uniform.  The male makes all the noise (as in so many species), a sound mediated by androgen and estradiol steroids (also a relationship we can appreciate). No "voice of the lobster," merely a series of grunts and an underlying hum.

Typical Type II male calls are divided into: short grunts that last for milliseconds or are produced in a series of grunts called a “grunt train,” mid-duration growls, and long duration advertisement hums that can last up to an hour.

--Wikipedia.  These sounds understandably excite the female into a frenzy of egg-laying.

The voice of the love-sick midshipman fish has been known to wake houseboat owners.  And that brings us back to West Seattle.  The reported hum has been so loud that experts suspect that it may have been amplified by the metal hulls of ships in the Duwamish river.  Other experts, more skeptical that the hum of the midshipman fish could be heard not merely by houseboat dwellers, but across the land mass of West Seattle, blame the noise on cement plants, ferry engines, or street sweepers.

But how prosaic! Everyone really prefers the midshipman fish theory.  They are ugly little devils, but, as a local fish expert put it lyrically: "These fish sing like birds at night to attract females."  It ill-behooves the citizens of West Seattle, whose own adolescent offspring sing their own amorous tunes, to begrudge our fishy friends a little love-struck humming.