This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

If you've ever gone snorkeling or scuba diving, you know how peaceful it sounds under there.

Aside from the crackling sound of snapping shrimp. Compare that to a reef with boat traffic.

Not quite as calming, and it gets on under sea creatures nerves too,

stressing out spiny lobsters, slowing the development of sea slugs,

and now scientists have found one more side effect of noise, impaired learning abilities for fish.

That studies in the proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Researchers started by teaching juvenile damselfish in the laboratory about the predators they'd encounter once they settled on an Australian reef.

The training consisted of injecting the damselfish's tanks with sea water, fouled with both the scent of a predator and alarm cues from injured damselfish.

It's a message that, hey, this predator smell, it means dead friends, maybe dead you.

To reinforce that lesson, they also lowered zip-lock bags with the predators

themselves into the damselfish's tanks together with the sense to teach them.

These guys are your enemies. They conducted all this training to a soundtrack of peaceful reef sounds,

or with the added distraction of buzzing boat engines.

And they found that fish that trained with normal reef sounds were suitably

spooked by the scent of a predator later on. But fish exposed to boat noise

totally unfazed. It appeared that the presence of void noise was interfering with the learning process.

So when later on we said, hey, here's a predator, are you scared?

They didn't respond.

Ma'erari, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

She says same thing held true in the real world too, once they released the fish.

Three days later, two-thirds of the quiet-trained fish were still alive, compared to only 20% of the fish

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