Fish Making A Symphony Under The Sea

For 20 years Marilyn Cicero thought she was living with a ghost.

"It would be like, boom boom boom, all through the house throughout the night, until 2 a.m.," Cicero said.

Barbara Peet, two doors down, heard it too, CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports.

"It just seemed to be in the room - with you!" she said.

Actually, it wasn't in the room. It was in the lake.

Their ghost was a fish's mating call, booming through the seawall of their backyard lake and reverberating into their walls.

"Your lake is one big pick-up joint!" Cobiella said.

"I never thought of it that way," she said.

Marine biologist Jim Locascio pinpointed the sound to a black drum fish.

And let's just say this fish is not the shy type.

"Group spawning is the way to do it and bringing together a large group of individuals can be done using a sound source," said Jim Locascio.

Fish talk in Hollywood all the time, such as in Nemo, but researchers are still learning their real-world language. Watch the video to hear what a real Nemo sounds like.

It has nothing on the toadfish, which flaps its sonic muscle three times faster than a hummingbird beats its wing.

Scientists believe most fish use sounds for mating, but they don't know much more. In fact they've taped fewer than 1,200 of the 30,000 species in the water.

Peet has plans for her noisy neighbor.

"But how do you get rid of 'em?" Cobiella asked.

"You can't!" Peet said.

As for the rest of us, there's a whole new noisy world to consider just below the surface.