Limiting motorboat noise on coral reefs boosts fish reproductive success
Nedelec, Sophie L., Radford, Andrew N., Gatenby, Peter, Davidson, Isla Keesje, Velasquez Jimenez, Laura, Travis, Maggie, Chapman, Katherine E., McCloskey, Kieran P., Lamont, Timothy A.C., Illing, Björn, McCormick, Mark I., and Simpson, Stephen D. (2022) Limiting motorboat noise on coral reefs boosts fish reproductive success. Nature Communications, 13 (1). 2822.
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Abstract
Anthropogenic noise impacts are pervasive across taxa, ecosystems and the world. Here, we experimentally test the hypothesis that protecting vulnerable habitats from noise pollution can improve animal reproductive success. Using a season-long field manipulation with an established model system on the Great Barrier Reef, we demonstrate that limiting motorboat activity on reefs leads to the survival of more fish offspring compared to reefs experiencing busy motorboat traffic. A complementary laboratory experiment isolated the importance of noise and, in combination with the field study, showed that the enhanced reproductive success on protected reefs is likely due to improvements in parental care and offspring length. Our results suggest noise mitigation could have benefits that carry through to the population-level by increasing adult reproductive output and offspring growth, thus helping to protect coral reefs from human impacts and presenting a valuable opportunity for enhancing ecosystem resilience.
| Item ID: | 76373 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
| Copyright Information: | Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Feb 2023 02:31 |
| FoR Codes: | 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 50% 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4105 Pollution and contamination > 410502 Noise and wave pollution processes and measurement @ 50% |
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