Most Sausalito residents know the humming toadfish, whose loud and incessant underwater droning all summer long keeps angry shore dwellers and houseboat residents awake for nights. The sound -- a perfect A-flat -- was a mystery for years, blamed by some conspiracy theorists in the 1980s on secret experiments by the Army Corps of Engineers lab on the city's waterfront, on the local water treatment plant or even on extraterrestrials. Then, a San Francisco marine biologist recognized it as the annoying sound that he'd heard as a graduate student studying fish and trying to sleep on the beach in Baja California: It was the sex call of a species known as the plainfin midshipman. Now scientists are studying the homely toadfish, known scientifically as Porichthys notatus, for clues to evolutionary biology and acoustics and even for insights into several rare muscular diseases. In the process, they are discovering more details about the toadfish's sex life. (Think menage a trois.)

At a meeting this week of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, scientists reported that one type of male toadfish has such extraordinary muscular strength above its swim bladder that it can hold its loud droning by vibrating those muscles for more than an hour at a time. Moreover, the toadfish vibrates the muscles at an astonishing 6,000 times a minute, twice the speed of a hummingbird's wing. The foot-long, flat-headed creature "is awfully ugly, but its specialized sonic muscles are truly beautiful," says Kuan Wang, who reported the results along with his colleagues at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Md.


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