Boat noise does not alter metabolic performance of a newly settled coral reef fish

Brief description

Oxygen uptake rates of P. amboinensis juveniles exposed to playback of ambient coral reef sound, or playback of a boat with a 30hp two stroke engine driving at 10-200 m.

Extract [Thesis: Chapter 3Jain-Schaepfer, Sofia (2018) The effect of motorboat noise on early life stages of coral reef fishes. Masters (Research) thesis, James Cook University.] Boat noise is increasing dramatically worldwide and has been found to have detrimental effects on fishes. It is therefore important to develop tools to measure the circumstances under which fishes are affected by boat noise. Measuring whole organism oxygen uptake rates as a proxy for metabolic rates can be a useful way of quantifying stress and its associated energetic costs. I demonstrate that a single small submersible pump often used in respirometry systems can expose fish to noise levels comparable to boat noise. Therefore, I designed and used a pumpless, noiseless aquatic intermittent-flow respirometry system to monitor changes in oxygen uptake rates of juvenile damselfish exposed to either the noise from an outboard power boat or natural ambient conditions. No significant change in oxygen uptake rates were detected in newly settled Pomacentrus amboinensis in response to the playback of boat noise. This suggests there is either no stress response occurring or no immediate energetic cost to the fish in response to the boat noise playback. The respirometry system designed in this study is valuable to future respirometry studies as it eliminates pump noise as a secondary unintentional stressor.

The full methodology is available in the Open Access thesis (Chapter 3) from the Related Publications link below.

Full description

This dataset is available as a spreadsheet in MS Excel (.xlsx) and Open Document formats (.ods)