In today's marine habitats, anthropogenic noise is widespread in space and time, affecting aquatic animalcommunities. Short-term exposure to noise is known to affect vital behaviours, such as the... Show moreIn today's marine habitats, anthropogenic noise is widespread in space and time, affecting aquatic animalcommunities. Short-term exposure to noise is known to affect vital behaviours, such as the ability toevade predators. However, long-term noise pollution may lead to differences in short-term responsesbetween naïve and experienced animals. We investigated the interaction between short-term and longterm sound exposure on the antipredator response of free-ranging sand gobies, Pomatoschistus minutus.We tested the effects of short-term boat noise playback on the response to a simulated predator strike inareas across a range of low to high long-term noise disturbance levels. Exposure to boat noise did notaffect the startle response, time frozen or response latency of gobies to a predator stimulus. However,individuals exposed to short-term boat noise playback were absent from the experimental area forshorter periods after the predator strike than gobies exposed to the silent control. Moreover, gobies inlong-term noisy habitats also stopped avoiding the area after the predator strike under silent controlconditions. These changes point to a decreased magnitude in antipredator response, as a function ofinteracting short- and longer-term levels of disturbance. Thus, prey species alter their antipredatorbehaviour in ways that can potentially lead to higher mortality for individual prey. This could ultimatelyhave implications at the level of the food web. Show less
