Noise pollution appears to cause some birds to change their songs making them less attractive
(PhysOrg.com) -- Most everyone knows that modern pollution causes a lot of problems for the other animals trying to exist on this planet. Chemicals in the air and water make animals sick or kill them; urban sprawl allows them fewer places to live and now apparently it seems that even the noise we humans create causes animals to suffer in previously unknown ways. Wouter Halfwerk, a behavioral ecologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences that shows that some birds find themselves forced to change their mating songs as they compete with noise pollution which results, in some cases, in the male birds being cheated on by their supposed mates.
