On the afternoon of Aug. 13, Charley passed over the harbor with winds exceeding 140 miles an hour. The recorder, near the harbor floor at a depth of about 12 feet, picked up loud low-frequency rumbles.

After the fast-moving storm passed, the recorded chorus of higher-frequency fish calls, mostly from sand seatrout, was louder than it had been in the previous nine days. The louder calls continued for the next three days, and began up to two and a half hours earlier than normal. The researchers are not sure why the changes occurred but suggest that the storm may have affected the distribution of fish in the harbor.

Good Whale News

This has been a good year for North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered whale species. Last week, scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service confirmed the 28th sighting of a mother-calf pair. The animals were videotaped off South Carolina and had earlier been spotted off Florida.

The number of sightings makes this year one of the best on record. There are only an estimated 300 North Atlantic right whales remaining, so the more calves spotted, the more hope that the whales' decline might be stopped or reversed.

Sleeping With More Than One Eye Open

Sleep is vital to the development of brain and body. That truism comes from basic observations about humans and other mammals, that sleep is maximized at birth and declines gradually until adulthood.

But a new finding threatens to throw that common wisdom out the window. For researchers have discovered that some whales and dolphins don't sleep after birth. Both newborns and their mothers stay continuously active for about a month and then gradually build up their sleep to normal adult levels after four or five months.

"What's going on is very different than any animal ever encountered," said Dr. Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles and an author of a paper describing the finding in Nature. Dr. Siegel and his colleagues studied newborn killer whales and bottlenose dolphins, recording their activities in pools at Sea World in San Diego and in an aquarium in Russia.