CSUN marine biologists surprised by the arrival of nearly 700 baby sea bass

When CSUN Marine Biology Master’s student Emily Ladin and her advisor, Professor Larry Allen, set out to record the mating song of the giant sea bass, they didn’t anticipate one of the results of that behavior — the most successful captive mating of the endangered Pacific fish on record.

Allen and Ladin and collaborators had set introduced three sea bass just old enough to be entering their reproductive age, two females and a male, into a tank at the Southern California Marine Institute, and were testing different recording instrument setups when, one morning, Ladin walked in to find a freshly laid mass of thousands of sea bass eggs, some already hatching. She scrambled to arrange for safe homes for the hatchlings at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium and the Aquarium of the Pacific. Months later, Allen is working on plans to release almost 700 juvenile sea bass into the wild.

Full details, and a recording of the sea bass mating song made on the night of that successful spawning, are in CSUNshine Today.