Communication through vocal sound is the major means for a great number of mammalian, birds and other animals. In their day-to-day activities of locating food, escaping from predators, navigating in their environment and enticing their mates, sound lays a major role. However, the noise arising out of voyaging ships, sonar probes in the sea and also by the running vehicles, airplanes or factory on land is causing animals to run, hide and panic and lose their focus. In some cases noise is leading to death.
According to a study released last Friday published by The Nature Communication, when a motorboat passes a water path on the sea or ocean, making great noise, the chances of some of the reef-dwelling fish being gobbled up by predators, get doubled.
The research gives additional evidence to the already existing studies that ‘Noise Pollution’; whether on land or in the water has become a great threat and danger for the very survival of some wild life.
Stressed by the sounds
Damselfish is a family of a number of species of fish that are found mostly in tropical areas. The study has found that their ability to escape from the pangs of predators get compromised when they get stressed by the sound of the motor boat passing nearby. Consequently, the fish get easily hunted by their predators.
A team of scientists led by Stephen Simpson of the University of Exeter, experimented in the laboratory as well as in the wild environment. They found that the effect of a pre-recorded sound and the sound made by a real boat had the same effect on the fish. They get disoriented to equal extent by both the sounds. Consequently, they were six times more susceptible to being darted away from an attack and more than twice susceptible to fall prey to larger fish.
Andy Radford, a co-author of the study and a research scholar at the University of Bristol says that the reason of falling easy prey is due to the combination of stress and inadequate response to the strikes of their predators.
Noise pollution affects marine and land animals in many ways.
- As the recent study suggests, it makes some species become easy target to predators.
- Noise creates an imbalance in the predator or prey ratio when the prey or the predator is stressed from a sound and runs away or hides away from its usual home.
- The noisy area reduces the habitat of a species when they tend to avoid living in a place which has lots of human made sounds.
- Loud sounds around them may make some species of animals to communicate more loudly, thereby making the entire ecosystem to communicate more loudly.
This phenomenon of predator-prey imbalance is further aggravated by the fact that, sound has a five times faster travelling speed in water compared to its speed in the air.
Next time you think of honking the car horn, stop and consider the harm you might be doing to your neighbourhood wildlife.
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Feature cartoon courtesy oregonstate.edu
Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_pollution
http://www.naturesounds.org/conservENW.html
http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/causes-and-effects-of-noise-pollution.php
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