A weird bass sound has been plaguing residents of South Tampa for over a year. Different people have come up with different hypotheses, with the most headline-catching theory being it's the sound of black drum fish mating.
Others believe it can’t be fish, instead saying the source has to be loud music.
Now, people investigating both theories are trying to capture the noise, in different ways.
James Locascio is a senior scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory.
He’s dropping microphones into areas along South Tampa, including Davis Islands and Ballast Point.
Locascio is hypothesizing that the odd sound people are hearing is similar to what he discovered in the early 2000s in canals around Cape Coral and Punta Gorda.
“So the black drum, we measured their strength at 165 decibels,” Locascio said. “That's relative to an underwater reference, so it's not directly comparable to air.”
For reference, that sound in the air can blow out an ear drum.
Underwater, its not that strong, but it’s still pretty loud. The drum fish do this with an incredibly strong swim bladder that produces the noise and acts almost like a speaker to stretch its volume out.
Some people have discounted the theory of fish making the noise, and Locascio says that makes sense.
“I think the reason people are hesitant to believe it is because the casual observer doesn't have the opportunity to listen to fish sounds and people aren't walking around with a hydrophone on them,” Locascio said.
Getting to the bottom of the noise
To dive into his hypothesis, Locascio is diving in and around the waters of Hillsborough Bay to drop underwater hydrophone microphones that can pick up the sound.
He says they’ll collect data until April when the mating season is over, and then analyze the sounds they get. Depending on specific conditions, the mics can potentially pick up sounds from the black drum from more than 100 meters away.
“We have people north of Kennedy, between Kennedy and I-275 [who have heard it], which is incredible to me. And then on the southwestern portion of the peninsula, down in Port Tampa. And then, all the way over to Ballast Point Park, there's a ton in the Ballast Point Park area.”Sara Healy, South Tampa resident
The mics pick up 20 seconds of sound every five minutes, meaning by April, they’ll have hundreds of hours of underwater noises to parse through.
Locascio suspects some people further inland in South Tampa are hearing the noise because the sounds are travelling through the storm drainage systems. But overall, he knows he needs more hard data to make solid determinations.
“While it's a very fun story, and it has had a lot of spins, I think there's also been a lot of respect for the fact that we're using a scientific method to try to get to an answer,” Locascio said.
She put out a call for help
He got involved because Sara Healy, a local resident who’s heard the sound, asked for his help.
While she expected to get support from people in her private South Tampa Facebook group where the conversation started, she’s surprised with all of the attention the story has gotten.
“I actually just spoke with a journalist out of Germany the other day,” Healy said. “Somebody from Canada called us. There's been 20 or 30 mentions of it. A lot of the stories are like derivative, though. They're like stories about stories and sort of on niche websites. So it was picked up by some national media, and that surprises me.”
She’s created a map, pinpointing all of the locations where people have reached out to her saying they’ve heard it.
“We have people north of Kennedy, between Kennedy and I-275 [who have heard it], which is incredible to me,” Healy said. “And then on the southwestern portion of the peninsula, down in Port Tampa. And then, all the way over to Ballast Point Park, there's a ton in the Ballast Point Park area.”
Healy launched a GoFundMe to help pay for Locascio’s research. She says others have come to her saying they’re sure its music, and she’s not discounting that possibility either.
“I don't think they're wrong,” Healy said. “I think that it's not an ‘either/or.’ I think that it's complicated. It's a complex situation. It's a dense urban area, and so we're going to have noises that are from multiple different sources.”
But Healy has questions, if it does turn out to be music.
“I'm about three miles from Raymond James Stadium, and I don't hear concerts,” Healy said. “I don't hear the cannons when the Bucs play. And so I don't know, it's just it's crazy to me that whatever the sound is that we're hearing is traveling over what I've calculated it to be approximately 20 square miles of the South Tampa peninsula, but we can't hear known sources of very loud things like concerts and cannons.”
“It rattles the entire house. It's just this constant vibration that you hear inside the house. And you think ‘oh, there's something wrong with my sound system or my stereo,’ and you're like turning all the noises down. And then you go outside and you hear it even louder. And you're like, ‘What is going on?’ ”Steph Kaltenbaugh, South Tampa resident
One of those suspicious of the sound coming from fish sex is Sara’s friend, Steph Kaltenbaugh. She says the two have gotten into some intense debate over the sound, within reason of course.
“We're not breaking up because of fish sex,” Healy said. “We're not unfriending each other.”
Steph’s method is a bit more boots-on-the ground. When she hears the sound, she hops in her mini-van and travels up and down Bayshore, trying to pinpoint it.
“We are on the hunt for the mystery noise,” Kaltenbaugh said while driving down Bayshore one Saturday night.
She says she’s heard the sound plenty of times over the past couple years.
“It rattles the entire house,” Kaltenbaugh said. “It's just this constant vibration that you hear inside the house. And you think ‘oh, there's something wrong with my sound system or my stereo,’ and you're like turning all the noises down. And then you go outside and you hear it even louder. And you're like, ‘What is going on?’ ”
Kaltenbaugh's driving adventures haven’t helped her pinpoint the location of the noise, but she has established that she thinks it’s music.
“It's the beats that you hear,” Kaltenbaugh said. “Like a rhythm, beats, you hear instruments.”
And Kaltenbaugh isn’t alone. In fact, one man says he believes he’s already discovered the origins of the sound.
“I know 110%.”
His theory: It's music
Brad Hall is a local video and audio producer. He says on Saturday night, he heard the sound and decided he wanted to figure out its origin.
He says he pointed a high-end directional microphone off Ballast Point Park Pier and triangulated the sound to somewhere across the bay. From there, he says he was able to find about a 10-degree angle from where the sound is coming from.
“At this particular point, my curiosity was strong enough that I decided, ‘well, I'm going to get my car and take my trusty microphone to the other side of the bay,’ ” Hall said.
Then, he drove to the other side of the bay along US Highway 41, and after a while, he started hearing loud music that rattled his car.
“I could hear it clear as day,” Hall said. “I mean, that sound was just pounding my windshield, like nobody's business.”
Hall came across two cars with rows of speakers along the back of them, playing loud music.
“And when I got over there, the sound levels, the visualization, the amount and size of the audio equipment, everything matched, it all made perfect sense,” Hall said.
He said he was on the phone with his wife at the same time, and when the men operating the speakers turned the music off, his wife stopped hearing the sound about 25 seconds later.
“Then about a minute later, these guys turn the sound back on, and I could hear it and I told her they had just turned it back on,” Hall said. “And she said, ‘Well, I don't hear it yet.’ And about 25 seconds later, South Tampa started rumbling again.”
Hall assembled his finding in a video he published.
Hall says he sees other possibilities as more fun options, which is why he thinks they're getting a lot of traction.
“This is kind of that wonderful ghost story or Loch Ness monster story or something like that, that always brings a lot of interest,” Hall said.
Others are skeptical of Hall’s findings being the ultimate answer.
“I think that it's a bit premature to suggest that this is the explanation for all of the bass noise or all of this phenomenon that people are reporting,” Healy said. “But, I mean, I get it. People want answers. They don't want ambiguity. They don't want unknowns.”
Locascio and Healy leading the underwater research say they’ll keep their study going and make more determinations in April, when they fish their mics out of the bay.
But an answer needs to be found, at the very least, so Kaltenbaugh can get some peace of mind.
“I’m gonna lose my mind … I mean I guess I’d have to get over it ,right?” Kaltenbaugh said. “But I think we’re all just extremely determined right now.”
