Land, sea and air - how our noise pollution is impacting other creatures
ByWe tend to think of pollution as something we can see or at least quantify, whether it be a river strewn with waste, a harbour full of plastic bags, or broken glass along the side of a highway. We are also aware of the damage we do to our air quality as we read about the particles of pollutants in the air we breathe or the ominous impacts to our ozone layer. Sometimes however our pollution impacts our environment simply due to what we consider our evolution and animals suffer from something we can’t even see - noise pollution. I was amazed to read about some of the ways our progress is impacting animals in terms of noise and wanted to share some examples with you.
Female gray tree frogs struggle to listen for and then locate male frogs who seek them during the mating season. The reason is the ever growing
noise from traffic near to their habitats. The population declines as the different species either struggle to find a potential partner or in the case of the European tree frog they’ve simply stopped trying by limiting their calls to ‘occasional’ versus the instinctive constant. A frogs way of saying I can’t compete with your noise.
The hermit crab evolved to have the ultimate in protection from enemies via their shells but this provides no buffer from noise. Studies show that the noise emitted from boats traveling nearby confuses the crabs to the extent that they fail to notice or hear the predators who seek them in the water. Delayed response time due to confusion results in the crabs being caught as prey rather than making safe in their shells. Hermit crabs that live in quieter locales survive at a much higher rate as their evolved protection in doing the trick - they react quicker and live longer.
We’ve made it harder for the creatures that fly also, as many bats, owls and birds, are finding noises from planes, construction, machinery and vehicle traffic is changing the way they live. Environmental noise has been shown to impact the way that bats and owls seek and hunt for prey. Bats such as the Bechstein’s bat are less likely to hunt in noisy areas and will move to other areas that don’t provide equivalent food sources and starve. Many waterbirds, birds of prey, and starlings have adapted to urban volumes by simply being louder themselves, other birds with lower frequencies are not as able to change their tunes, which potentially causes them to fail to communicate with and find each other for mating.
Sadly we are even having negative noise related impacts under the ocean waves as noise from sonar, commercial shipping and drilling for oil and gas are causing great harm. It appears that whales, dolphins and porpoises can become scared by the high-pitch sounds, causing them to surface in too shallow water that is beyond their physical limits and beach themselves. Communication within these species also falls foul of noise pollution like sonar, which has caused some dolphins to go temporarily deaf and whales to be separated from their calves. The potential problems in the the oceans may be the most perilous of all as due to climate change, the oceans are expected to get noisier as molecules that absorb sound waves are being changed as the water becomes more acidic. Some are predicting that sound absorption in the ocean may decrease by 60 percent and that underwater noise may travel 70 percent further in the future as a result of climate change.
The fragile ecology of our earth never sounded so at risk.
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