Seals are deafened in noisy shipping lanes, say scientists

Urbanisation of marine environment impacts on seal hearing and is comparable to noise pollution of inner cities

Seals are being temporarily deafened by underwater noise in the UK’s busy shipping lanes, a new study suggests. Researchers compared the experience of the seals to that of people living amid the din of inner cities.

Dr Esther Jones, an ecologist from the University of St Andrews, said: “Like humans living in busy, noisy cities, some seals live in areas where there is a lot of shipping traffic and associated noise.

“The UK has some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and underwater noise has been increasing over the last 30 years.”

Her team drew up maps showing the extent to which grey and harbour seals around the UK were affected by shipping traffic. The scientists then investigated noise levels that individual animals were likely to be subjected to in Moray Firth on the north-east coast of Scotland.

For 20 of the 28 seals studied, the predicted noise from shipping was loud enough to cause temporary hearing loss. The maps showed that 11 of 25 special areas of conservation may contain seals affected by shipping.

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Traffic Noise Is No Picnic for Prairie Dogs

By Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | July 18, 2014 05:03pm ET

The first time Graeme Shannon bicycled along the grassy terrain of Colorado, he completely missed the prairie dogs. The small rodents blended into the fields, where they foraged on grass and roots before disappearing into their burrows.

After a closer look, Shannon, a postdoctoral behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, found two prairie-dogcolonies about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the nearestroad. The relative quiet surrounding the burrows made him wonder how the prairie dogs would react to the loud sounds of traffic.

Other researchers have studied the effects of noise pollution on animals — mostly birds and marine creatures — but few have investigated whether it changes the behavior of land mammals. Typically, it's difficult to isolate the effect of human-made noise from other variables, such as chemical pollution and habitat reduction, which can skew findings. The remote prairie colonies solved that problem: Shannon could bring the noise to the prairie dogs and study its effects on their actions.

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City songbirds victims of noise

PUEBLA, Mexico, Nov. 21 (UPI) -- Noise pollution reduces the presence of songbirds in cities and must be considered when analyzing urban biodiversity, Mexican and Spanish researchers say.
A study by the University of the Americas in Mexico and the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development, carried out in the metropolitan area of Puebla-Cholula in Mexico, revealed green zones most affected by noise have fewer bird species, basqueresearch.com reported Monday.

Among the birds better adapted to urban conditions that are being affected by noise pollution are various species of finches, sparrows and thrushes, the researchers said.

The green spaces studied for the frequency of occurrence of 38 songbirds species included urban parks, main squares, university campuses, natural reserves close to the city and even cemeteries.
Squares and urban parks were the noisiest sites among those studied and, in turn, the ones with a small number of species, researchers said.

The next challenge is to discover what levels of noise can be tolerated by each of the species of birds inhabiting urban environments, they said.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/11/21/Study-City-songbirds-victims-of-noise/UPI-50401321913546/#ixzz1eWxCt5q1