Do Fish Fart?
Fish flatulence may not be one of those most common marine mysteries you are dieing to know the answer to, but at the same time it has never failed to create a perplexed look on the recipients face and get everyone thinking…do they?
Well, the answer depends on your definition of a fart. If you consider farting to be the by-product of digestion (gases) expelled solely through the rear-end, then no most fish don’t fart (with the exception of herring and sand sharks). Some may say they’ve observed air escaping from the neither region of a fish after they gulped air at the surface, but this isn’t really a product of digestion, so can it be termed a fart? Most fish do use air to inflate and deflate their bladder to maintain buoyancy which is expelled either through their mouth or gills which can be mistaken for a fart. For example, sand tiger sharks gulp air into their stomachs at the surface which they then discharge out the back door to attain a desired depth. Is that a fart in the true sense of the word? We’ll let you decide. Experts say that the digestive gases of fish are consolidated with their feces and expelled in gelatinous tubes which fish sometimes eat again (eew…I know!). Point being – No farts.
The Herring however, is a whole other story. Research and observation has shown that this fish creates a mysterious underwater noise through their stern (referred to as farting or breaking wind0, which is always accompanied by a fine stream of bubbles. This way of expelling air to create a high-frequency sound is means of communication for the herring and shows no connection to digestive gases or what we call farts except that it looks like bubbles coming out of the anal duct of the fish.