Unveiling the impacts of noise pollution on marine fish community dynamics

Abstract

Anthropogenic noise pollution is increasingly recognized as a critical threat to marine ecosystems, with well-documented impacts on fish physiology at the individual-level. However, a significant research gap remains in understanding how these individual-level disruptions scale up to influence community and ecosystem dynamics. To address this, we expand a size-based marine fish community model to incorporate noise-induced disruptions across four physiological pathways: food intake, energy expenditure, mortality, and reproductive output. Our results reveal that the total fish biomass declines across all pathways as noise increases, with particularly pronounced declines when energy expenditure, mortality, and reproduction are impacted. Demersal fish exhibit resilience to multiple disturbances, whereas large pelagic fish are highly sensitive to noise-induced increases in energy expenditure and mortality. The overall impact of noise on fish community depends not only on the severity of physiological disruptions, but also on the combination of functional types affected and the physiological pathways disturbed. Our model underscores the role of compensatory dynamics among fish functional types, which can buffer community biomass declines and expand regions of stable coexistence, even when large pelagic fish face extinction. However, severe noise impacts still pose risk of system collapse, with potential extinctions across all fish functional types. These findings emphasize the significance of compensatory dynamics in enhancing system stability against underwater noise. Our study provides new insights in understanding the community-level impacts of noise pollution, highlighting the need for further field studies and comprehensive noise regulations to ensure ecosystem stability and biodiversity conservation.