All the Noise, Noise, Noise!!

Hello fans! Toni asked me, Burt, to tell you all about this new study she and her other gal pals were involved in, and I have to admit it’s pretty cool! Did you know that underwater noise pollution has been increasing over the past few decades?  With more and more noise from boats, underwater drilling, and other human-generated activities, it’s getting pretty noisy for us fishes and other aquatic animals! So how does this underwater noise affect our behaviors and physiology you ask? Well, as usual, the scientists designed an experiment to test how noise impacted the ladies when they were mouthbrooding. They played loud noises from an underwater speaker during the mouth brood period and found that it impaired maternal care behaviors in mothers because lots of them either ate their babies or prematurely spit them out! These mothers also had high levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, and different expression levels of genes involved in maternal care behaviors and feeding in a specific region of the brain called the hypothalamus. So these are some pretty negative impacts on these moms! But what about the baby fry that were developing in their mouths during the noise exposure? Well, the scientists examined them too and found that after they fully developed and were released from their mom’s mouths’ they had higher mortality, lower body condition, slower growth rates, and altered behaviors compared to controls that were not exposed to noise. These fry exposed to noise in their mothers mouth also had altered gene expression in their heads compared to controls. So a single exposure to loud noise has really negative impacts on mothers and their fry babies on many levels!  This research provides more information on how noise has detrimental effects on fishes like us, which can ultimately lead to reduced reproductive fitness and biodiversity – Toni and I sure hope humans can learn from this and try to reduce the noise levels in oceans and lakes where we live!

Here’s the research paper that describes this experiment in detail:

Butler, J.M.and K.P. Maruska. 2020. Noise during mouthbrooding impairs maternal care behaviors and juvenile development and alters brain transcriptomes in the African cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni. Genes, Brain and Behavior. 20: e12692. link

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