Man's noise is definitely not the food of love for our animal neighbours

Two separate recent studies published in UK journals have shown the disruptive effects of human noise on animal species, affecting not only their hearing but their ability to communicate and make suitable sexual pairings.

Adult zebra finches given a variety of food foraging tasks in quiet lab conditions performed them differently when exposed to traffic noise, the birds' problem solving, spatial memory, and skills in learning from each other being negatively affected. The birds' performance was suppressed by noise in all tests except in associative colour learning; they maintained their ability to discriminate between different coloured lids to determine which contained the food reward.

UK researchers reported similar findings from studying courting behaviour among Mediterranean field crickets (gryllus bimaculatus) in both natural ambient soundscapes and artificial noise or traffic noise conditions. In man-made...