Human noise affects animal behaviour, studies show

Working home because of coronavirus caused noise pollution. Research shows that it gets in the way with animal cognition and mating. To capture the effect of traffic sound zebra finches (species of songbirds) were put in a laboratory with stimulated sound of it. A few tasks were made to see how they would react. They were designed to test birds' motor skills, object manipulating, ability to discriminate between colours and spatial memory. All tasks except colour association showed that zebra finches were negatively affected by the noises. Another study did research about how female Mediterranean field crickets were making mating under the traffic sound conditions. Usually males attract them by rubbing their wings together. To test the effect of noise the researchers clipped their wings, left them to interact with females and then played an artificial song to when they were trying to court the females. This study showed that because of the noise female crickets mounted sooner and more frequently when paired with high-quality courtship song. In my opinion this research shows another importance of negative human impact. Nowadays it's mainly shown as air and water polluting but as we can see it has also an effect on animals. I think it's sad how much we disturb other beings without even realizng.