Traffic noise causes lifelong harm to baby birds

If you think it’s hard to chat next to a busy highway, try raising a nestling there. A new experiment on developing birds shows traffic noise can slow their growth and lead to lifelong impairments. The finding raises new concerns about the effect of noise pollution on wildlife—and humans as well. “I’m surprised by these effects,” says Clinton Francis, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University who was not involved in the work. He says the new paper, published today in Science , “provides very strong evidence for a direct impact of noise.” Researchers already knew excess noise can disturb breeding birds , making it more difficult for parents to communicate with and care for their nestlings. But it wasn’t clear whether the noise itself could directly harm young birds. Mylene Mariette, a behavioral ecologist at Deakin University, and her team set out to answer that question with zebra finches held in an aviary on campus in Melbourne, Australia. For 5 nights in a row, they removed eggs from the nests of breeding finches and played some of them either road noise or zebra finch songs for several hours in a separate room before returning the eggs to the nests. The sounds were kept at a moderate volume of 65 decibels—about the same loudness as a conversation in a bar or city traffic—and they couldn’t be heard by the parent birds. Other eggs were left in silence. After the eggs hatched, the baby birds r...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research