Noisy Pollution

Our urban environment is filled with noises from construction work, vehicles, music, voices, movement etc. I honestly hate noise pollution and noisy places in general. It is impossible to wake up late when my neighbours are doing renovation work, and when the nearby primary school children are having their recess. And difficult to enjoy my music when the MRT train travels through the underground tracks from Bishan towards Marina Bay. Enjoying the peace and tranquility of a park, only to have it taken from me when a group of rowdy people come anywhere near is another level of annoyance too. However, this is all that noise pollution is to us, an annoyance. It usually cannot do any significant damage. If they can, we are given warnings and have ways to prevent them.

 

Animals do not get the same kind of luxuries as we do. There aren’t any warnings or preventive measures from noise pollution, and it has been shown to clearly affect aquatic animals such as dolphins (Dey et al., 2019), prawns (Filiciotto et al., 2016), and fish (Wysocki et al., 2006) just to name a few. Stressing the animals, disrupting echo location and changing their behaviour. This might come as a surprise to some, but noise pollution affects arachnids too. It might be obvious for insects to be affected as there are crickets and cicadas that are notoriously noisy and are the most heard insects in parks (based on experience), but spiders can also hear! They “listen” to vibrations in the ground and webbing with their legs, and also have special hairs on a leg segment that are sensitive to vibrations in the air (Shamble et al., 2016).

Spiders are also negatively affected by sound. Orb weaver spiders have a tougher time detecting their prey that is trapped in the web (Wu & Elias, 2014), while wolf spiders become stressed and behave differently at certain frequencies which reduces their chance of successfully mating (Gordon, 2010), and from the video above, jumping spiders might use sound to evade predatory wasps. Many families of spiders do not have good eyesight and rely on their legs and hairs to detect vibrations made by prey and mates. It could be an atomistic fallacy, but I believe all spiders with similar habits and environments will suffer with similar effects which could slowly, but surely, dwindle their fitness and population. It was also noticed that there is a negative correlation between the number of spiders and a noise source (Bunkley et al., 2017).

Solutions to reduce noise in the environment? It seems (unsurprisingly) that there are more ideas and measures for reducing noise pollution impacts to us people than animals. Understandably, it is impossible to remove sound entirely from a system but if perhaps more attention and care were given to those more affected, their situation could improve.

 

references

 

Bunkley, J. P., McClure, C. J. W., Kawahara, A. Y., Francis, C. D., & Barber, J. R. (2017). Anthropogenic noise changes arthropod abundances. Ecology and evolution, 7(9), 2977-2985. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2698

 

Dey, M., Krishnaswamy, J., Morisaka, T., & Kelkar, N. (2019). Interacting effects of vessel noise and shallow river depth elevate metabolic stress in Ganges river dolphins. Scientific reports, 9(1), 15426-15413. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51664-1

 

Filiciotto, F., Vazzana, M., Celi, M., Maccarrone, V., Ceraulo, M., Buffa, G., Arizza, V., de Vincenzi, G., Grammauta, R., Mazzola, S., & Buscaino, G. (2016). Underwater noise from boats: Measurement of its influence on the behaviour and biochemistry of the common prawn ( Palaemon serratus , Pennant 1777). Journal of experimental marine biology and ecology, 478, 24-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2016.01.014

 

Gordon, S. D. (2010). Environmental interference and seismic communication in wolf spiders (Publication Number Dissertation/Thesis) ProQuest Dissertations Publishing]. http://nus.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwpV3fS8MwED6cIsgEf-OcSvC90ybtmj4Jcx2Cj_q0l5GlFxnM1jUb4n9vkrazTNiLb1caytELX6-5-74DYLT34G1gAiKnPjO4wFMaqJCKiKeB5LFEO3LEsaUHA_o6ZskLa5L6q3DXKOmgO82lPTW_j2I_sDqT_cfPhWfHSNlyazVTowV7vlUas-zfZj60_n03aYZB4tDs6Ur3qb7mf0DZfWlGR82OENdi4veyVal1qN83NBz_4_oxtIeNUvwJ7GB2CvvlaMpvYyWytsa5s85gmPyy4sScWKWJoqILEpGlRONMf8wkkU3SiVlGvvK5ItrOoi30OdyNkrenZ692eVJtZz1Z-8su4FDY1vts6Sh66SUQrqjsm7QjwEiZ2ErBEGOpcCrCQNEpdqC75YlXW-924aAs19szj2vYXRYrvIGWefG3LrI_HUm6Vg

 

Shamble, Paul S., Menda, G., Golden, James R., Nitzany, Eyal I., Walden, K., Beatus, T., Elias, Damian O., Cohen, I., Miles, Ronald N., & Hoy, Ronald R. (2016). Airborne Acoustic Perception by a Jumping Spider. Current biology, 26(21), 2913-2920. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.08.041

 

Wu, C.-H., & Elias, D. O. (2014). Vibratory noise in anthropogenic habitats and its effect on prey detection in a web-building spider. Animal behaviour, 90, 47-56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.01.006

 

Wysocki, L. E., Dittami, J. P., & Ladich, F. (2006). Ship noise and cortisol secretion in European freshwater fishes. Biological conservation, 128(4), 501-508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2005.10.020

 

Featured photo by erfan parhizi on Unsplash