Speaker
Description
Many organisms rely on vibration detection to communicate, navigate, find food, and reproduce. However, the presence of human-made, or anthropogenic, noise through moving machine parts and silence by human-made solid structures, raises concerns about its impact on their locomotion patterns, metabolism, social interaction, development, distribution, food web, and thus resource turnover and ecosystems.
However, it is not yet clear how anthropogenic vibrational noise impacts animals, or with other words, whether animals can sense typical human-made vibrations and change their behavior accordingly. A systematic quantitative aggregation and alignment of ground vibration data from the geophysics/civil engineering research community with vibrational sensitivity and behavioral experiments from the life-sciences is currently lacking.
The present talk aims to approach this missing link between typical noise characteristics and insect sensation capabilities by presenting a compiled novel dataset based on existing literature data from diverse experimental settings. The aims are to i) illustrate potential interferences of vibrational noise pollution with insect vibration detection thresholds and ii) highlight zones of interest of vibrational frequency-amplitude combinations, which should be picked up in behavioral experiments to quantify potential stress reactions in insects.
Based on this, some preliminary results on the locomotion behavior of ants under vibrational stress of our ongoing vibrational playback experiments will be presented as an example. As ecosystem engineers, ants are of particular interest. Through their tunneling and generalist foraging behavior ants contribute significantly to resource turnover and are therefore potentially good candidates for generic energy budget modeling, which has been developed by the iDiv corecenter.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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