Interacting effects of short-term and long-term noise exposure on antipredator behaviour in sand gobies

In today's marine habitats, anthropogenic noise is widespread in space and time, affecting aquatic animal communities. Short-term exposure to noise is known to affect vital behaviours, such as the ability to evade predators. However, long-term noise pollution may lead to differences in short-term responses between naive and experienced animals. We investigated the interaction between short-term and longterm sound exposure on the antipredator response of free-ranging sand gobies, Pomatoschistus minutus. We tested the effects of short-term boat noise playback on the response to a simulated predator strike in areas across a range of low to high long-term noise disturbance levels. Exposure to boat noise did not affect the startle response, time frozen or response latency of gobies to a predator stimulus. However, individuals exposed to short-term boat noise playback were absent from the experimental area for shorter periods after the predator strike than gobies exposed to the silent control. Moreover, gobies in long-term noisy habitats also stopped avoiding the area after the predator strike under silent control conditions. These changes point to a decreased magnitude in antipredator response, as a function of interacting shortand longer-term levels of disturbance. Thus, prey species alter their antipredator behaviour in ways that can potentially lead to higher mortality for individual prey. This could ultimately have implications at the level of the food web. (c) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Anthropogenic noise in marine habitats affects aquatic animal communities, with long-term noise pollution leading to differences in short-term responses. Prey species alter their antipredator behavior, potentially increasing individual mortality and impacting the food web.