How does sound affect animal behavior?
1 Answer
Different types of sounds have different effects on different organisms.
Explanation:
Sound has many effects on the behaviour of organisms, which are, probably, not all discovered yet.
There are many researchers around the world trying to understand how animals react to certain music or sounds and why this happens.
For example, in high school, I did a little project in which we let students remember 20 random pictures and let them after a minute tell us which pictures they saw.
Every student was tested twice: once without an annoying mono sound and one time with. (different images of course).
On average we saw that most students were better capable of remembering these pictures without that sound. Of course, our experiment wasn't perfect with 20 students but it showed me that the effect sound has is very difficult to research (a lot of variables).
But we know that sound has an effect because we can think of an animal in a wood with a sound created at 100 dB (loud) that has no chance to hear his attacker incoming and therefore cannot escape.
Another example is a bat, that is using ultrasonic sounds to 'see' its surroundings. When you distorts this signal, he cannot 'see' and cannot hunt efficiently.
If you want to read some more about this subject, you could take a look into: http://www.icben.org/2003/pdf/104_t7.pdf
