From DNA to ecological performance: Effects of anthropogenic noise on a reef-building mussel.

Responses of marine invertebrates to anthropogenic noise are insufficiently known, impeding our understanding of ecosystemic impacts of noise and the development of mitigation strategies. We show that the blue mussel, Mytilus edulis, is negatively affected by ship-noise playbacks across different levels of biological organization. We take a novel mechanistic multi-method approach testing and employing established ecotoxicological techniques (i.

Beyond a Simple Effect: Variable and Changing Responses to Anthropogenic Noise.

A growing number of experimental studies have demonstrated that exposure to anthropogenic noise can affect the behavior and physiology of a variety of aquatic organisms. However, work in other fields suggests that responses are likely to differ between species, individuals, and situations and across time. We suggest that issues such as interspecific and intrapopulation variation, context dependency, repeated exposure and prior experience, and recovery and compensation need to be considered if we are to gain a full understanding of the impacts of this global pollutant.

Size-dependent physiological responses of shore crabs to single and repeated playback of ship noise.

Anthropogenic noise has fundamentally changed the acoustics of terrestrial and aquatic environments, and there is growing empirical evidence that even a single noise exposure can affect behaviour in a variety of vertebrate organisms. Here, we use controlled experiments to investigate how the physiology of a marine invertebrate, the shore crab (Carcinus maenas), is affected by both single and repeated exposure to ship-noise playback. Crabs experiencing ship-noise playback consumed more oxygen, indicating a higher metabolic rate and potentially greater stress, than those exposed to ambient-noise playback.