Study: Noisy Environment Affects Plants
Noise impacts animals and, possibly, the plants they interact with
April 16, 2012
Western scrub-jays are important dispersers of piñon pine seeds. A single individual may hide thousands of seeds in scattered caches in the ground.
Researchers haven’t given much thought to the effect of noise and noise pollution on plants.
But that could be about to change.
In northwestern New Mexico’s Rattlesnake Canyon, gnarled juniper trees and piñon pines dominate a landscape of high mesas and rough sandstone cliffs.
Tucked in among the trees are thousands of natural gas wells. About one-third of them are pressurized by ear-splitting compressors.
“They run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with the exception of periodic maintenance, so they are going all the time,” says Clinton Francis, of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina.
Since 2005, he’s been studying how Rattlesnake Canyon’s birds respond to the compressors’ non-stop racket.
Black-chinned hummingbirds are drawn to noisy sites near natural gas well compressors, possibly to avoid western scrub jays, which prey on their eggs and chicks.
“Black-chinned hummingbirds, for example, tend to prefer and settle in really noisy landscapes, and western scrub jays tend to avoid these noisy areas,” Francis says.
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