From distraction to habituation: Ecological and behavioural responses of invasive fish to anthropogenic noise

Abstract

Freshwater communities worldwide include many exotic invasive species whose spread is facilitated by the increase in shipping for commercial and recreational purposes (Levine & D'Antonio, 2003; Perrings et al., 2005; Reid et al., 2019). Tolerance to human-induced environmental changes such as thermal stress (Zerebecki & Sorte, 2011), hypoxia (Lagos et al. 2017), and increased salinity (Ellis & MacIsaac, 2009) contributes to the success of invasive species.Among the various threats to freshwater communities (Dudgeon et al., 2006), the degradation of soundscapes concomitant with commercial and recreational activities is considered an emerging

From behaviour to complex communities: Resilience to anthropogenic noise in a fish-induced trophic cascade

“…This is also consistent with the total number of prey eaten recorded during the predation tests, which was significantly reduced by motorboat noise for the roach that never experienced boat noise before but not for those pre-exposed to boat noise in the mesocosms. Weakening of the response to noise after repeated exposure has been reported in other fish species [38,55,56],…”

“…This is also consistent with the total number of prey eaten recorded during the predation tests, which was significantly reduced by motorboat noise for the roach that never experienced boat noise before but not for those pre-exposed to boat noise in the mesocosms. Weakening of the response to noise after repeated exposure has been reported in other fish species [38,55,56], and might reflect habituation through associative learning: naïve animals first allocate . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license available under a was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.…”

“…This is also consistent with the total number of prey eaten recorded during the predation tests, which was significantly reduced by motorboat noise for the roach that never experienced boat noise before but not for those pre-exposed to boat noise in the mesocosms. Weakening of the response to noise after repeated exposure has been reported in other fish species [38,55,56], and might reflect habituation through associative learning: naïve animals first allocate attention to noise at the expense of other activities like feeding, and then resume normal behaviour as they learn that it is not associated with any threat. However, when looking closer to what has been eaten, we found motorboat noise to elicit selective preference for daphnids over Chaoborus larvae even for roach pre-exposed to boat noise in the mesocosm.…”

“…This persistent response could find its origin in behaviour. Concerning invertebrates, although we did not record their behaviour, we know from past investigations that motorboat noise did not alter the mobility of daphnids [27] but triggers body rotations in Chaoborus larvae [38], interpreted as an anti-predatory response [57,58] that could have driven the choice of roach towards daphnids. Concerning roach behaviour, we found no alteration in mobility and no evidence for any avoidance of the sound source, but the area occupied by the three individuals was larger under motorboat noise.…”

“…In the mesocosms without boat noise, a 1-hr audio track of silence was looped continuously. In the mesocosms with boat noise, we used the audio tracks described in [38] where 150 sounds of small recreational boats have been distributed over the nine consecutive 1-hr audio tracks of silence going from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. so as to mimic the daily activity of a small leisure base (Fig. 1A and Supp.…”