The researchers say the recordings sounded so normal that -- except for the sounds of the hurricane -- there was no way to tell that Charley had passed through.
"We had expected them not to spawn that night," Mann says.
But apparently the fish didn't see the churning waters as a threat, and they had something more important on their minds. And that led to what Mann admits sounds a little more like humming and grunting than the Top 40 list.
"It's sort of like what people do after a storm passes," Mann says. "You just keep doing what you were doing before."
He means singing, of course.
Lee Dye's column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the "Los Angeles Times," he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.