ABSTRACT: Aquatic anthropogenic noise is on the rise, with growing concern about its impact on species that are sensitive to low-frequency sounds (e.g. most fish and invertebrates). We investigated whether the reef fish Halichoeres bivittatus living in both noisy and quiet areas had differing levels of baseline stress (measured as whole-body cortisol) and whether they would exhibit a physiological stress response when exposed to boat noise playbacks. While the playback experiments significantly increased cortisol levels in fish from our experiment compared to baseline levels, there were minimal pairwise differences across treatments and no difference in baseline stress for fish living in noisy vs. quiet areas. These results may be explained by low overall auditory sensitivity, habituation to a fairly noisy environment (due to biological sounds), or that boat noise simply may not represent an immediate threat to survival in this species. These findings contrast recent studies that have shown elevated stress responses in fishes when exposed to boat noise and highlights that inter-specific differences must be considered when evaluating potential impacts of anthropogenic noise on marine life.

中文翻译：

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在野外暴露于船上的噪音对野生珊瑚鱼的应激反应最小

摘要：水生人为噪声正在上升，人们日益关注其对对低频声音敏感的物种（例如大多数鱼类和无脊椎动物）的影响。我们调查了珊瑚鱼Halichoeres bivittatus生活在嘈杂和安静地区的基线压力水平（以全身皮质醇衡量）以及暴露于船上噪声回放下是否会表现出生理压力反应均存在差异。尽管与基线水平相比，回放实验显着提高了我们实验鱼类的皮质醇水平，但生活在嘈杂地区与安静地区的鱼之间，各处理之间的成对差异最小，基线压力也没有差异。这些结果可能是由于总体听觉敏感性低，习惯于相当嘈杂的环境（由于生物声音）所致，或者船上的噪音可能并不直接代表对该物种生存的直接威胁。