If you think it’s hard to chat next to a busy highway, try raising a nestling there. A new experiment on developing birds shows traffic noise can slow their growth and lead to lifelong impairments. The finding raises new concerns about the effect of noise pollution on wildlife—and humans as well.
Mylene Mariette, a behavioral ecologist at Deakin University, and her team set out to answer that question with zebra finches held in an aviary on campus in Melbourne, Australia. For 5 nights in a row, they removed eggs from the nests of breeding finches and played some of them either road noise or zebra finch songs for several hours in a separate room before returning the eggs to the nests.
As the nestlings developed, they also showed worrying development signs. Those exposed to noise grew slower, had a lower concentration of red blood cells, and the tips of their chromosomes were damaged—an indication of cellular stress. Moreover, when those birds grew up, they had about half as many offspring as the birds exposed to song as youngsters. “I’ve never had such clear results in any experiments,” Mariette says.
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