Noisy human neighbours affect where urban monkeys live

Abstract

Urban areas and many natural habitats are being dominated by a new selection pressure: anthropogenic noise. The ongoing expansion of urban areas, roads and airports throughout the world makes the noise almost omnipresent. Urbanization and the increase of noise levels form a major threat to living conditions in and around cities. Insight into the behavioural strategies of urban survivors may explain the sensitivity of other species to urban selection pressures. Here, we show that urban black-tufted marmosets ( Callithrix penicillata ) living in noisy urban areas may select their home-range based primarily on ambient noise level. We have tested the hypothesis that the noise from vehicular traffic and visitors in an urban park in Brazil influences the use of home-range (space) by urban marmosets. Marmosets even avoided noisy areas with high food availability. In addition, they systematically preferred the quieter areas even with dynamic changes in the acoustic landscape of the park between weekdays and Sundays (no observations were made on Saturdays). These data provide evidence that the use of home-range by wild animals can be affected by a potential aversive stimulus such as noise pollution.

Anthropogenic noise reduces bird species richness and diversity in urban parks

“…It has been shown in the same urban area that L eq levels of > 50 dB but < 60 dB are sufficient to create areas that wild urban Black‐tufted Marmosets Callithrix penicillata avoid (Duarte et al . ). Likewise, urban birds modify their song in an attempt to cope with noise levels comparable to those found in this study, so there is little doubt that noise levels measured in this study would have had impacts on avian communication (Slabbekoorn & Peet , Brumm , Fernández‐Juricic et al .…”

Zoo visitor effect on mammal behaviour: Does noise matter?

“…These studies provide some insights into the zoo visitor effect; however, a better quantification of zoo visitor impacts would provide greater insights. Sound pressure level metres are now relatively low cost and the principles of measuring and assessing noise pollution have been well established by acoustic engineers (Rossing, 2007) and are now used by biologists (e.g., Duarte et al, 2011).…”

“…We used 'equivalent continuous sound level' (L eq ) as our measurement of noise, which is the energy mean of the noise level averaged over the measurement period. L eq is the most widely used measurement of sound pollution (see Rossing, 2007;Duarte et al, 2011). We also calculated the percentage sound pressure level L 50 , which represents an average sound pressure level during the sampling.…”

The impact of noise from open-cast mining on Atlantic forest biophony

“…Other species exhibit behavioral changes including avoiding noisy areas during foraging (Miksis-Olds et al, 2007;Schaub et al, 2008) and other daily activities (Sousa-Lima and Clark, 2009;Duarte et al, 2011). Area avoidance and acoustic compensatory mechanisms to reduce or offset the effects of noise may alter the acoustic complexity of a community in a given location, resulting in a decrease in species' abundance (Bayne et al, 2008) and/or diversity (Proppe et al, 2013) at noise-polluted sites.…”