Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years. Yacold also

partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for

gut health, an investigator-led research program. To learn more about Yachtold, visit yawcult.co.

com.j. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

Large ocean-going vessels like oil tankers and cruise ships produce noise that travels long distances underwater.

That audio pollution can disrupt the sounds that marine mammals, fish, and other animals used to communicate.

When there's lots of noise from ship traffic, it basically masks those sounds, so they just

can't hear each other. University of Exeter sensory ecologist Emily Carter. She wondered

whether ship noise might also be detrimental to animals that don't rely on sound for communication.

For example, young shore crabs that use camouflage to hide from predators.

So they can actually change their color to match whatever it is that they're sitting on,

basically to make it harder for predators to find them.

Carter suspected that stress from ship noise might hinder the

color change process. To find out, she and her colleagues collected juvenile shore crabs with

dark shells and brought them back to the lab. They placed the crabs in tanks full of white

gravel. An underwater speaker in each tank played quiet natural sounds at all times.

One group of crabs also heard loud natural sounds every hour, but another group was subjected to

hourly recordings of large ships. Carter says shorebirds, which eat the crabs, can see UV light, so she used ultraviolet photography to determine how well the crabs blended into their new habitat over time.

Through the eyes of a shorebird, so through a bird's perspective, were they camouflaged, weren't they camouflaged, how obvious would they be?

After eight weeks, the crabs that heard only natural sounds had become much lighter and were well camouflaged.

...