Chronic anthropogenic noise disrupts glucocorticoid signaling and has multiple effects on fitness in an avian community

Abstract

Significance Studies examining relationships among habitat disturbance, physiology, and fitness in wild animals often produce contradictory or inconclusive results, casting doubt on current conservation physiology predictive frameworks linking stress and fitness. We apply a new framework drawn from experimental systems utilizing chronic inescapable stressors to explore how noise, an environmental stimulus common to wildlife habitats worldwide, disrupts stress hormone signaling and impacts fitness. We utilize a natural experiment to show that chronic, anthropogenic noise reduced baseline corticosterone levels, increased acute corticosterone response, and, at highest amplitudes, negatively impacted multiple measures of fitness across three species of birds. Our work brings conservation physiology theory involving wild animals into needed alignment with recent theories based on chronic stress in laboratory studies.