Live spectrogram
Watch the sound as it happens. Every detection points at the exact seconds of evidence it heard.
Your phone can't ping the water. It can listen to it.
FishRadar Ear is on-device fish-sound detection: a live spectrogram of what your microphone hears, recognition of 13 named species and 7 call types, and whole spawning choruses — offline, with the evidence shown for every detection.
FishRadar Ear is rolling out now — live for TestFlight testers today, arriving on the App Store and Google Play with the next app update. The Sound Library and everything on this page stay free for everyone.
Scan to install on your phone
Why listening?
Why your phone can't be a fish finder — and doesn't need to be
Every "phone fish finder" on the app stores is one of two things: a display for a sonar pod you still have to buy, or fake. The physics is unforgiving — a phone speaker pings air, and the water surface reflects essentially all of that energy straight back. No app can sonar-scan the water with a bare phone. Nobody can.
So FishRadar Ear doesn't ping. It listens. Fish make real sounds — drumming muscles rolling against swim bladders, grinding throat teeth, whole aggregations chorusing in spawning season — and the loudest of those sounds cross into a boat hull, or on calm nights into the air itself. Listening is the one acoustic superpower a bare phone honestly has.
What it hears
A detector trained on real ocean recordings
The detector runs entirely on your phone, offline — nothing is uploaded. We trained it on thousands of hours of real ocean recordings.
13 species, 7 call types
Named species — from black drum to oyster toadfish — plus call types like knocks, boatwhistles and drumming rolls. And whole spawning choruses: many fish calling together.
The Knock
An 8-second self-test that tells you whether your hull setup is actually listening — before you spend a quiet night trusting it.
Hold-for-Proof
Press and hold to mint a share card carrying the spectrogram evidence of what you heard. Your location is never on the card.
The science
Anglers listened first. The science caught up.
In the Gulf of California, fishing crews have located Gulf corvina spawning aggregations for generations by pressing an ear to the hull — a 2017 study in Biology Letters documented one crew finding two tons of corvina in about twenty minutes, by ear alone.
And in December 2025, University of Victoria biologists showed that eight Pacific species — rockfishes, lingcod, kelp greenling, pile perch — each sound distinctive enough for a machine-learning model to tell apart. Fish don't just make noise; they identify themselves.
Straight answers
What no tier can do
Show distance in metres. Promise fish. Count a chorus. Hear a single quiet fish through a hull. Nobody can do these honestly — so we don't. The Ear shows a three-step confidence level, never an invented number, and quiet never means empty water.
How you get it
Free to learn. Pro to listen. Captain to go deep.
- Free — the Sound Library with real recordings, true stories, the chorus season map, and chorus-night alerts. Education is never gated.
- Pro — Chorus Mode and Hull Ear: live listening with the phone you already own. Choruses only — massed spawning fish, calm nights, engine off.
- Captain — the full Ear with a works-with hydrophone: species confirmed by voice, proof clips, spawning alerts and louder-or-quieter trend. FishRadar sells the listening, not the hardware.
Questions anglers ask
Can a phone really hear fish?
Yes — within honest limits. The loudest fish sounds, like drumming choruses and toadfish hums, cross from the water into a boat hull, and on calm nights even into the air. FishRadar Ear listens with the microphone your phone already has and shows a live spectrogram of what it hears. A bare phone detects choruses — many fish calling together; hearing single quiet fish takes a works-with hydrophone.
Do I have to buy hardware?
No. Chorus Mode and Hull Ear work with just your phone. A low-cost hull puck improves contact, and a works-with hydrophone unlocks the full single-call detector — but FishRadar sells the listening, not the hardware.
Is FishRadar Ear a fish finder?
No — and that's the point. Fish finders ping the water; a bare phone physically can't. The Ear is passive: it detects real sounds fish actually make. It will never show fish icons at a depth or distance, because passive listening cannot honestly measure either.
Which fish can it hear?
Sound-making species — above all the drum and croaker family: black drum, red drum, spotted seatrout, Atlantic croaker, corvinas and their relatives, plus toadfish and midshipman. It names 13 species and 7 call types, detects whole spawning choruses, and ships a free Sound Library so you can learn the voices yourself.
Does it work everywhere, all the time?
No — and we say so up front. Fish calling is seasonal and conditional: spawning windows, calm nights, engine off. Outside those windows the honest answer is silence, and quiet does not mean empty water.
Does my audio leave the phone?
No. Detection runs entirely on-device and works offline. Nothing is uploaded, and share cards never include your location.
Go deeper
Hear it for yourself
The Sound Library is free — real recordings of drums, croakers and toadfish, and the true stories behind them. Get FishRadar and take the 60-second listen.
Scan to install on your phone