Figure 2.

Impact of sensory pollution on animal responses across taxa. Sensory pollution can cause general disturbance of behaviour and endocrinology, or interfere with detection and processing of signals and cues. Sensory pollution can be restricted to a single sensory domain (unimodal), affect processes and responses in a different domain (cross-modal), or arrive at the brain through multiple sensory systems (multimodal). Exposure to anthropogenic noise disturbs blue whales and masks acoustic prey cues used by bats [53,54]. Acoustic noise also disturbs visual signalling in squids and may interfere with visual processing in hermit crabs [55,56]. Combined light and noise pollution may increasingly disturb a robin's song behaviour and anthropogenic noise travelling through air and along the water surface may interfere with multimodal communication in frogs (see also figure 1b). (Online version in colour.)