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🗓️ 11 March 2020
⏱️ 3 minutes
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0:00.0 | May I have your attention please you can now book your train tickets on Uber and get |
0:08.0 | 10% back in credits to spend on your next Uber ride so you don't have to walk home in the brain again. |
0:15.0 | Trains, now on Uber. T's and C's Science. I'm Suzanne Bard. |
0:29.0 | Large ocean-going vessels like oil tankers and cruise ships produce noise that travels long distances |
0:36.7 | underwater. That audio pollution can disrupt the sounds that marine mammals, fish and other animals used to communicate. |
0:45.2 | When there's lots of noise from ship traffic, it basically masks those sounds so they just |
0:50.9 | can't hear each other. |
0:52.1 | University of Exeter sensory ecologist Emily Carter. |
0:56.0 | She wondered whether ship noise might also be detrimental to animals that don't rely on sound for communication. |
1:02.0 | For example, young shore crabs... that don't rely on sound for communication. |
1:03.0 | For example, young shore crabs that use camouflage |
1:06.2 | to hide from predators. |
1:07.8 | So they can actually change their color |
1:10.1 | to match whatever it is that they're sitting on, basically to make it harder for predators to find them. |
1:15.6 | Carter suspected that stress from ship noise might hinder the color change process. |
1:20.8 | To find out, she and her colleagues collected juvenile shore crabs with dark shells and brought them back to the lab. |
1:28.0 | They placed the crabs in tanks full of white gravel. |
1:32.0 | An underwater speaker in each tank played quiet natural sounds at all times. |
1:37.6 | One group of crabs also heard loud natural sounds every hour, but another group was subjected to hourly recordings of large ships. |
1:47.1 | Carter says shorebirds, which eat the crabs, can see UV light, so she used ultraviolet photography to determine how well the crabs |
1:55.6 | blended into their new habitat over time. Through the eyes of a shorebird so through a bird's |
2:01.7 | perspective were they camouflaged weren't they camouflaged, how obvious would they be? |
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