Zou Jianwen, Jin Baoling, Ao Yuqin, Han Yuqing, Huang Baohua, Jia Yuyang, Yang Lijian, Jia Ya, Chen Qicai, Fu Ziying
Hubei Key Laboratory of Genetic Regulation & Integrative Biology, School of Life Sciences, Central China Normal University, No.152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, 430079, China.
College of Physical Science and Technology, Central China Normal University, No.152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, 430079, China.
Conserv Physiol. 2023 Apr 22;11(1):coad017. doi: 10.1093/conphys/coad017. eCollection 2023.
The environment noise may disturb animal behavior and echolocation via three potential mechanisms: acoustic masking, reduced attention and noise avoidance. Compared with the mechanisms of reduced attention and noise avoidance, acoustic masking is thought to occur only when the signal and background noise overlap spectrally and temporally. In this study, we investigated the effects of spectrally non-overlapping noise on echolocation pulses and electrophysiological responses of a constant frequency-frequency modulation (CF-FM) bat, . We found that called at higher intensities while keeping the CFs of their echolocation pulses consistent. Electrophysiological tests indicated that the noise could decrease auditory sensitivity and sharp intensity tuning, suggesting that spectrally non-overlapping noise imparts an acoustic masking effect. Because anthropogenic noises are usually concentrated at low frequencies and are spectrally non-overlapping with the bat's echolocation pulses, our results provide further evidence of negative consequences of anthropogenic noise. On this basis, we sound a warning against noise in the foraging habitats of echolocating bats.
声学掩蔽、注意力降低和噪声回避。与注意力降低和噪声回避机制相比，声学掩蔽被认为仅在信号与背景噪声在频谱和时间上重叠时才会发生。在本研究中，我们调查了频谱不重叠噪声对恒频-调频（CF-FM）蝙蝠回声定位脉冲和电生理反应的影响。我们发现，[蝙蝠名称]在保持其回声定位脉冲的CF频率一致的情况下，以更高强度发出叫声。电生理测试表明，该噪声会降低听觉灵敏度并锐化强度调谐，这表明频谱不重叠噪声会产生声学掩蔽效应。由于人为噪声通常集中在低频，并且在频谱上与蝙蝠的回声定位脉冲不重叠，我们的结果进一步证明了人为噪声的负面后果。在此基础上，我们对回声定位蝙蝠觅食栖息地中的噪声发出警告。
