nospam wrote:
>> I would argue that neither is fraud.
>
> correct. neither is fraud.
Given the iKooks own a low IQ and no education in case law... I repeat:
The legal definition of fraud _always_ contains a set of from 3 to about 9
conditions, *_all_ of which must be met* for a conviction to be upheld.
It's likewise for copyright law, where, in some cases, Google _legally_
publishes entire books on the Internet for public use...
What low IQ ill-educated iKooks don't realize is this basic legal fact:
*Every tenet must be met for it to be considered illegal*
Not just one.
>> A website that serves content is not entitled to leave data on my
>> computer without my permission, and I am certainly allowed to remove
>> that data whenever I chooose.
>
> you gave it permission to leave data on your computer by choosing to
> not block cookies.
You actually believe that, which is why I claim:
a. You iKooks have a low IQ
b. And no education in case law
c. Such that you claim everything you can't do, to be illegal.
>>>> I can often disable a site's complete page covering pop-up subscription
>>>> demand by using Tranquility and read the article underneath.
>>>>
>>>> Is this a fraud or theft?
>>>
>>> if the popup to sign up is a requirement to continue and view content,
>>> then it's a paywall, same as the newspaper subscription you just asked
>>> about. if it's just a request but you can click away and continue, then
>>> blocking it is probably fine.
>>
>> So if you can click directly, it's fine, but if you have to use a piece
>> of software to choose which data you view, it's not.
>
> not necessarily.
Where did you iKooks get your law degree from?
The common theme here is everything you can't figure out how to do, you
iKooks call illegal (simply because you can't do it on the iOS platform).
Meanwhile, everyone else on every other platform (including the Mac!)
can easily do what is only difficult to do on the crippled iOS platform.
>> The Atlantic has a pop-up that covers the page, but using the Reader
>> function of Safari allows me to read the article anyway.
>>
>> Is that "theft of services?
>
> what does the terms of service of the website say?
On VPN, with an additional proxy, I just went to the Atlantic web page:
<
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/>
I clicked on what appears to be the cover story:
�<
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/light-noise-pollution-animal-sensory-impact/638446/>
I didn't need to agree to _anything_ that I could see, and to prove it,
below is the full text (it's just a select-all though) of what I read.
Did I break the law?
==== < cut here for what I just read as the cover story > ====
SKIP TO CONTENTSite Navigation
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July/August 2022 Issue
EXPLORE
SCIENCE
HOW ANIMALS PERCEIVE THE WORLD
Every creature lives within its own sensory bubble, but only humans have
the capacity to appreciate the experiences of other species. What we've
learned is astounding.
By Ed Yong
Photographs by Shayan Asgharnia
black and white photograph of an eight-inch-tall eastern screech owl
Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic
JUNE 13, 2022
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which
our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through
Friday. Sign up for it here.
Within the 310,000 acres of Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park, one of the
largest parking lots is in the village of Colter Bay. Beyond the lot's far
edge, nestled among some trees, is a foul-smelling sewage-pumping station
that Jesse Barber, a sensory ecologist at Boise State University, calls the
Shiterator. On this particular night, sitting quietly within a crevice
beneath the building's metal awning and illuminated by Barber's flashlight,
is a little brown bat. A white device the size of a rice grain is attached
to the bat's back. "That's the radio tag," Barber tells me. He'd previously
affixed it to the bat so that he could track its movements, and tonight he
has returned to tag a few more.
Magazine Cover image
Explore the July/August 2022 Issue
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From inside the Shiterator, I can hear the chirps of other roosting bats.
As the sun sets, they start to emerge. A few become entangled in the large
net Barber has strung between two trees. He frees a bat, and Hunter Cole,
one of his students, carefully examines it to check that it's healthy and
heavy enough to carry a tag. Once satisfied, Cole daubs a spot of surgical
cement between its shoulder blades and attaches the tiny device. "It's a
little bit of an art project, the tagging of a bat," Barber tells me. After
a few minutes, Cole places the bat on the trunk of the nearest tree. It
crawls upward and takes off, carrying $175 worth of radio equipment into
the woods.
I watch as the team examines another bat, which opens its mouth and exposes
its surprisingly long teeth. This isn't an aggressive display; it only
looks like one. The bat is unleashing a stream of short, ultrasonic pulses
from its mouth, which are too high-pitched for me to hear. Bats, however,
can hear ultrasound, and by listening for the returning echoes, they can
detect and locate objects around them.
Echolocation is the primary means through which most bats navigate and
hunt. Only two animal groups are known to have perfected the ability:
toothed whales (such as dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales) and bats.
Echolocation differs from human senses because it involves putting energy
into the environment. Eyes scan, noses sniff, and fingers press, but these
sense organs are always picking up stimuli that already exist in the wider
world. By contrast, an echolocating bat creates the stimulus that it later
detects. Echolocation is a way of tricking your surroundings into revealing
themselves. A bat says "Marco," and its surroundings can't help but say
"Polo."
Join us: Ed Yong and Clint Smith in conversation at Sixth and I
The basic process seems straightforward, but its details are extraordinary.
High-pitched sounds quickly lose energy in air, so bats must scream to make
calls that are strong enough to return audible echoes. To avoid deafening
themselves, bats contract the muscles in their ears in time with their
calls, desensitizing their hearing with every shout and restoring it in
time for the echo. Each echo provides a snapshot in time, so bats must
update their calls quickly to track fast-moving insects; fortunately, their
vocal muscles are the fastest known muscles in any mammal, releasing up to
200 pulses a second. A bat's nervous system is so sensitive that it can
detect differences in echo delay of just one- or two-millionths of a
second, which translates to a physical distance of less than a millimeter.
A bat thus gauges the distance to an insect with far more precision than
humans can.
Echolocation's main weakness is its short range: Some bats can detect small
moths from about six to nine yards away. But they can do so in darkness so
total that vision simply doesn't work. Even in pitch-blackness, bats can
skirt around branches and pluck minuscule insects from the sky. Of course,
bats are not the only animals that hunt nocturnally. In the Tetons, as I
watch Barber tagging bats, mosquitoes bite me through my shirt, attracted
by the smell of the carbon dioxide on my breath. While I itch, an owl flies
overhead, tracking its prey using a radar dish of stiff facial feathers
that funnel sound toward its ears. These creatures have all evolved senses
that allow them to thrive in the dark. But the dark is disappearing.
black and white photo of bat upside down with mouth open
A big brown bat's ability to echolocate allows it to thrive in the dark.
(Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
Barber is one of a growing number of sensory biologists who fear that
humans are polluting the world with too much light, to the detriment of
other species. Even here, in the middle of a national park, light from
human technology intrudes upon the darkness. It spews forth from the
headlights of passing vehicles, from the fluorescent bulbs of the visitor
center, and from the lampposts encircling the parked cars. "The parking lot
is lit up like a Walmart because no one thought about the implications for
wildlife," Barber says.
Many flying insects are fatally attracted to streetlights, mistaking them
for celestial lights and hovering below them until they succumb to
exhaustion. Some bats exploit their confusion, feasting on the disoriented
swarms. Other, slower-moving species, including the little brown bats that
Barber tagged, stay clear of the light, perhaps because it makes them
easier prey for owls. Lights reshape animal communities, drawing some in
and pushing others away, with consequences that are hard to predict.
Every animal is enclosed within its own sensory bubble, perceiving but a
tiny sliver of an immense world.
To determine the effect of light on the bats of Grand Teton, Barber
persuaded the National Park Service to let him try an unusual experiment.
In 2019, he refitted all 32 streetlights in the Colter Bay parking lot with
special bulbs that can change color. They can produce either white light,
which strongly affects the behavior of insects and bats, or red light,
which doesn't seem to. Every few days during my visit, Barber's team flips
their color. Funnel-shaped traps hanging below the lamps collect the
gathering insects, while radio transponders pick up the signals from the
tagged bats. These data should reveal how normal white lights affect the
local animals, and whether red lights can help rewild the night sky.
Cole gives me a little demonstration by flipping the lights to red. At
first, the parking lot looks disquietingly infernal, as if we have stepped
into a horror movie. But as my eyes adjust, the red hues feel less dramatic
and become almost pleasant. It is amazing how much we can still see. The
cars and the surrounding foliage are all visible. I look up and notice that
fewer insects seem to be gathered beneath the lamps. I look up even farther
and see the stripe of the Milky Way cutting across the sky. It's an
achingly beautiful sight, one I have never seen before in the Northern
Hemisphere.
Every animal is enclosed within its own sensory bubble, perceiving but a
tiny sliver of an immense world. There is a wonderful word for this sensory
bubble-Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic German
zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for
"environment," but Uexküll didn't use it to refer to an animal's
surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those
surroundings that an animal can sense and experience-its perceptual world.
A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of
hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. It doesn't care
about other stimuli, and probably doesn't know that they exist. Every
Umwelt is limited; it just doesn't feel that way. Each one feels
all-encompassing to those who experience it. Our Umwelt is all we know, and
so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion that
every creature shares.
Read: An ingenious injection can create infrared vision
Humans, however, possess the unique capacity to appreciate the Umwelten of
other species, and through centuries of effort, we have learned much about
those sensory worlds. But in the time it took us to accumulate that
knowledge, we have radically remolded those worlds. Much of the devastation
that we have wrought is by now familiar. We have changed the climate and
acidified the oceans. We have shuffled wildlife across continents,
replacing indigenous species with invasive ones. We have instigated what
some scientists have called an era of "biological annihilation," comparable
to the five great mass-extinction events of prehistory. But we have also
filled the silence with noise and the night with light. This often ignored
phenomenon is called sensory pollution-human-made stimuli that interfere
with the senses of other species. By barraging different animals with
stimuli of our own making, we have forced them to live in our Umwelt. We
have distracted them from what they actually need to sense, drowned out the
cues they depend upon, and lured them into sensory traps. All of this is
capable of doing catastrophic damage.
2 black and white photos: a close-up view of a sea turtle's head; a
titmouse with head bowed and paws over eyes
A sea turtle's hatchlings can be diverted away from the sea by artificial
lights. For mice, human-made noise
can mask the sounds of predators. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
In 2001, the astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano and his colleagues created the
first global atlas of light pollution. They calculated that two-thirds of
the world's population lived in light-polluted areas, where the nights were
at least 10 percent brighter than natural darkness. About 40 percent of
humankind is permanently bathed in the equivalent of perpetual moonlight,
and about 25 percent constantly experiences an artificial twilight that
exceeds the illumination of a full moon. "'Night' never really comes for
them," the researchers wrote. In 2016, when the team updated the atlas, it
found that the problem had become even worse. By then, about 83 percent of
people-including more than 99 percent of Americans and Europeans-were under
light-polluted skies. More than a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent
of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way. "The thought of light
traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in
the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall
depresses me to no end," the visual ecologist Sönke Johnsen once wrote.
At Colter Bay, Cole flips the lights from red back to white and I wince.
The extra illumination feels harsh and unpleasant. The stars seem fainter
now. Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us
from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their
surroundings and to one another. In making the planet brighter and louder,
we have endangered sensory environments for countless species in ways that
are less viscerally galling than clear-cut rain forests and bleached coral
reefs but no less tragic. That must now change. We can still save the quiet
and preserve the dark.
Every year on September 11, the sky above New York City is pierced by two
columns of intense blue light. This annual art installation, known as
Tribute in Light, commemorates the terrorist attacks of 2001, with the
ascending beams standing in for the fallen Twin Towers. Each is produced by
44 xenon bulbs with 7,000-watt intensities. Their light can be seen from 60
miles away. From closer up, onlookers often notice small flecks, dancing
amid the beams like gentle flurries of snow. Those flecks are birds.
Thousands of them.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around UsED
YONG,RANDOM HOUSE
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This annual ritual unfortunately occurs during the autumn migratory season,
when billions of small songbirds undertake long flights through North
American skies. Navigating under cover of darkness, they fly in such large
numbers that they show up on radar. By analyzing meteorological radar
images, Benjamin Van Doren showed that Tribute in Light, across seven
nights of operation, waylaid about 1.1 million birds. The beams reach so
high that even at altitudes of several miles, passing birds are drawn into
them. Warblers and other small species congregate within the light at up to
150 times their normal density levels. They circle slowly, as if trapped in
an incorporeal cage. They call frequently and intensely. They occasionally
crash into nearby buildings.
Migrations are grueling affairs that push small birds to their
physiological limit. Even a night-long detour can sap their energy reserves
to fatal effect. So whenever 1,000 or more birds are caught within Tribute
in Light, the bulbs are turned off for 20 minutes to let the birds regain
their bearing. But that's just one source of light among many, and though
intense and vertical, it shines only once a year. At other times, light
pours out of sports stadiums and tourist attractions, oil rigs and office
buildings. It pushes back the dark and pulls in migrating birds.
In 1886, shortly after Thomas Edison commercialized the electric light
bulb, about 1,000 birds died after colliding with illuminated towers in
Decatur, Illinois. More than a century later, the environmental scientist
Travis Longcore and his colleagues calculated that almost 7 million birds
die each year in the United States and Canada after flying into
communication towers. The lights of those towers are meant to warn aircraft
pilots, but they also disrupt the orientation of nocturnal avian fliers,
which then veer into wires or each other. Many of these deaths could be
avoided simply by replacing steady lights with blinking ones.
"We too quickly forget that we don't perceive the world in the same way as
other species, and consequently, we ignore impacts that we shouldn't,"
Longcore tells me in his Los Angeles office. Our eyes are among the
sharpest in the animal kingdom, but their high resolution comes with the
cost of low sensitivity. Unlike most other mammals, our vision fails us at
night, so we crave more nocturnal illumination, not less.
Read: The dark side of light
The idea of light as a pollutant is jarring to us, but it becomes one when
it creeps into places where it doesn't belong. Widespread light at night is
a uniquely anthropogenic force. The daily and seasonal rhythms of bright
and dark remained largely inviolate throughout all of evolutionary time-a
4-billion-year streak that began to falter in the 19th century.
When sea-turtle hatchlings emerge from their nests, they crawl away from
the dark shapes of dune vegetation toward the brighter oceanic horizon. But
lit roads and beach resorts can steer them in the wrong direction, where
they are easily picked off by predators or squashed by vehicles. In Florida
alone, artificial lights kill baby turtles in the thousands every year.
They've wandered into a baseball game and, more horrifying, abandoned beach
fires. The caretaker of one property in Melbourne Beach found hundreds of
dead hatchlings piled beneath a single mercury-vapor lamp.
black and white photo of cricket
Female crickets struggle to find the best mates when noise pollution masks
the males' songs. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
Artificial lights can also fatally attract insects, contributing to their
alarming global declines. A single streetlamp can lure moths from 25 yards
away, and a well-lit road might as well be a prison. Many of the insects
that gather around streetlamps will likely be eaten or dead from exhaustion
by sunrise. Those that zoom toward vehicle headlights will probably be gone
even sooner. The consequences of these losses can ripple across ecosystems.
In 2014, as part of an experiment, the ecologist Eva Knop installed
streetlamps in seven Swiss meadows. After sunset, she prowled these fields
with night-vision goggles, peering into flowers to search for moths and
other pollinators. By comparing these sites to others that had been kept
dark, Knop showed that the illuminated flowers received 62 percent fewer
visits from pollinating insects. One plant produced 13 percent less fruit
even though it was visited by a day shift of bees and butterflies.
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The presence of light isn't the only factor that matters; so does its
nature. Insects with aquatic larvae, such as mayflies and dragonflies, will
fruitlessly lay their eggs on wet roads, windows, and car roofs, because
these reflect horizontally polarized light in the same way bodies of water
do. Rapidly flickering light bulbs can cause headaches and other
neurological problems in humans, even though our eyes are usually too slow
to detect these changes; what, then, do they do to animals with faster
vision, like insects and small birds?
Colors matter, too. Red is better for bats and insects but can waylay
migrating birds. Yellow doesn't bother turtles or most insects but can
disrupt salamanders. No wavelength is perfect, Longcore says, but blue and
white are worst of all. Blue light interferes with body clocks and strongly
attracts insects. It is also easily scattered, increasing the spread of
light pollution. It is, however, cheap and efficient to produce. The new
generation of energy-efficient white LEDs contain a lot of blue light, and
the world might switch to them from traditional yellow-orange sodium
lights. In energy terms, that would be an environmental win. But it would
also increase the amount of global light pollution by two or three times.
From the April 2020 issue: Ed Yong on how we can save giraffes from
extinction
After talking with Longcore, I head home to Washington, D.C., on a red-eye
flight. As the plane takes off, I peer out the window at Los Angeles. The
twinkling grid of lights stirs the same primordial awe that comes from
watching a starry sky or a moonlit sea. But as the illuminated city recedes
beneath my window, that amazement is tinged with unease. Light pollution is
no longer just an urban problem. Light travels, encroaching even into
places that are otherwise untouched by human influence. The light from Los
Angeles reaches Death Valley, one of the largest national parks in the
United States, more than 150 miles away. True darkness is hard to find.
So is true silence.
It's a sunny April morning in Boulder, Colorado, and I've hiked up to a
rocky hillside, about 6,000 feet above sea level. The world feels wider
here, not just because of the panoramic view over conifer forests but also
because it is blissfully quiet. Away from urban ruckus, quieter sounds
become audible over greater distances. On the hillside, a chipmunk is
rustling. Grasshoppers snap their wings together as they fly. A woodpecker
pounds its beak against a nearby trunk. Wind rushes past. The longer I sit,
the more I seem to hear.
Two men puncture the tranquility. I can't see them, but they're somewhere
on the trail below, intent on broadcasting their opinions to all of
Colorado. Then I realize I can also hear faraway vehicles zooming along a
highway beyond the trees. Denver hums in the distance, an ambient backdrop
that I had all but blocked out. I notice the roaring engines of a plane
flying overhead. After my hike, I meet up with Kurt Fristrup, who says he's
been backpacking since the mid-1960s. In that time, aircraft emissions have
increased nearly sevenfold. "One of my favorite parlor tricks when friends
visit is to ask, at the end of the hike, if they heard any aircraft," he
tells me. "People will say they remember one or two. And I'll say there
were 23 jets and two helicopters."
Before he retired, Fristrup was a scientist at the National Park Service's
Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, a group that works to safeguard
(among other things) the United States' natural soundscapes. To protect
them, the team first had to map them, and sound, unlike light, can't be
detected by satellites. Fristrup and his colleagues spent years lugging
recording equipment to almost 500 sites around the country, capturing
nearly 1.5 million audio samples. They found that human activity doubles
the background-noise levels in 63 percent of protected spaces like national
parks, and increases them tenfold in 21 percent. In the latter places, "if
you could have heard something 100 feet away, now you can only hear it 10
feet away," Rachel Buxton, a former National Park Service research fellow,
told me. Aircraft and roads are the main culprits, but so are industries
like oil and gas extraction, mining, and forestry, which fill the air with
drilling, explosions, engine noises, and the thud of heavy tires. Even the
most heavily protected areas are under acoustic siege.
black and white photo of fluffy little bird with eyes and beak both wide
open
Busy roads may drown out the alarm calls of songbirds like the tufted
titmouse. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
In towns and cities, the problem is worse, and not just in the United
States. In 2005, two-thirds of Europeans were immersed in ambient noise
equivalent to perpetual rainfall. Such conditions are difficult for the
many animals that communicate through calls and songs. Scientists have
found that noisy neighborhoods in Leiden, in the Netherlands, compel great
tits to sing at higher frequencies so that their notes don't get masked by
the city's low-pitched hubbub. Nightingales in Berlin are forced to belt
out their tunes more loudly to be heard over the surrounding din. Urban and
industrial noise can also change the timing of birds' songs, suppress the
complexity of their calls, and prevent them from finding mates. Noise
pollution masks not only the sounds that animals deliberately make but also
the "web of unintended sounds that ties communities together," Fristrup
says. He means the gentle rustles that tell owls where their prey is, or
the faint flaps that warn mice about impending doom.
In 2012, Jesse Barber and his colleagues Heidi Ware Carlisle and
Christopher McClure built a phantom road. On a ridge in Idaho that acts as
a stopover for migrating birds, the team set up a half-mile corridor of
speakers that played looped recordings of passing cars. A third of the
usual birds stayed away. Many of those that didn't paid a price for
persisting. With tires and horns drowning out the sounds of predators, the
birds spent more time looking for danger and less time looking for food.
They put on less weight and were weaker during their arduous migrations.
The phantom-road experiment was pivotal in showing that wildlife could be
deterred by noise and noise alone, detached from the sight of vehicles or
the stench of exhaust. Hundreds of studies have come to similar
conclusions. In noisy conditions, prairie dogs spend more time underground.
Owls flub their attacks. Parasitic Ormia flies struggle to find their
cricket hosts.
Sounds can travel over long distances, at all times of day, and through
solid obstacles. These qualities make them excellent stimuli for animals
but also pollutants par excellence. Noise can degrade habitats that look
idyllic and make otherwise livable places unlivable. And where will animals
go? In 2003, 83 percent of the contiguous United States lay within about a
kilometer of a road.
Even the seas can't offer silence. Although Jacques Cousteau once described
the ocean as a silent world, it is anything but. It teems with the sounds
of breaking waves and blowing winds, bubbling hydrothermal vents and
calving icebergs, all of which carry farther and travel faster underwater
than in air. Marine animals are noisy, too. Whales sing, toadfish hum, cod
grunt, and bearded seals trill. Thousands of snapping shrimp, which stun
passing fish with the shock waves produced by their large claws, fill coral
reefs with sounds similar to sizzling bacon or Rice Krispies popping in
milk. Some of this soundscape has been muted as humans have netted, hooked,
and harpooned the oceans' residents. Other natural noises have been drowned
out by the ones we added: the scrapes of nets that trawl the seafloor; the
staccato beats of seismic charges used to scout for oil and gas; the pings
of military sonar; and, as a ubiquitous backing track for all this
commotion, the sounds of ships.
Read: These animals are feasting on the ruins of an extinct world
"Think about where your shoes come from," the marine-mammal expert John
Hildebrand tells me. I look; unsurprisingly, the answer is China. Some
tanker carried my shoes across the Pacific, leaving behind a wake of sound
that radiated for miles. From 1945 to 2008, the global shipping fleet more
than tripled, and began moving 10 times more cargo at higher speeds. And in
the past 50 years, shipping vessels have multiplied the levels of
low-frequency noise in the oceans 32-fold-a 15-decibel increase over levels
that Hildebrand suspects were already 10 to 15 decibels louder than in
pre-propeller seas. Because giant whales can live for a century or more,
there are likely whales alive today that have personally experienced this
growing underwater racket and now can hear only a small fraction of their
former range. As ships pass in the night, humpback whales stop singing,
orcas stop foraging, and right whales become stressed. Crabs stop feeding,
cuttlefish change colors, damselfish are more easily caught. "If I said
that I'm going to increase the noise level in your office by 30 decibels,
OSHA would come in and say you'd need to wear earplugs," Hildebrand tells
me. "We're conducting an experiment on marine animals by exposing them to
these high levels of noise, and it's not an experiment we'd allow to be
conducted on ourselves."
Because of the way we have upended the worlds of other animals, senses that
have served their owners well for millions of years are now liabilities.
Smooth vertical surfaces, which don't exist in nature, return echoes that
sound like open air; perhaps that's why bats so often crash into windows.
Dimethyl sulfide, the seaweedy-smelling chemical that once reliably guided
seabirds to food, now also guides them to the millions of tons of plastic
waste that humans have dumped into the oceans; perhaps that's one reason an
estimated 90 percent of seabirds eventually swallow plastic. Manatees can
detect the currents produced by objects moving in the water with
whiskerlike hairs found all over their body, but not with enough notice to
avoid a loud, fast-moving speedboat; boat collisions are responsible for at
least a fifth of deaths among Florida's manatees. Odorants in river water
can guide salmon back to their stream of birth, but not if pesticides in
that same water blunt their sense of smell. Weak electric fields at the
bottom of the sea can guide sharks to buried prey, but also to high-voltage
cables.
black and white close-up photo of underside of manatee's head showing its
whiskers, with mouth open
Manatee whiskers can detect currents in the water, but not quickly enough
to dodge loud, fast boats. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
Some animals have come to tolerate the sights and sounds of modernity.
Others even flourish among them. Some urban moths have evolved to become
less attracted to light. Some urban spiders have gone in the opposite
direction, spinning webs beneath streetlights and feasting on the attracted
insects. In some Panama towns, nighttime lights drive frog-eating bats
away, allowing male túngara frogs to load their songs with sexy flourishes
that would normally attract predators as well as mates. Animals can adapt,
by changing their behavior over an individual lifetime and by evolving new
behaviors over many generations.
Read: Why some moths are evolving to avoid artificial light
But adaptation is not always possible. Species that mature and breed slowly
can't evolve quickly enough to keep pace with levels of light and noise
pollution that double every few decades. Creatures that have already been
confined to narrow corners of shrinking habitats can't just up and leave.
Those that rely on specialized senses can't just retune their entire
Umwelt.
With every creature that vanishes, we lose a way of interpreting the world.
Our influence is not inherently destructive, but it is often homogenizing.
In pushing out species that cannot abide our sensory onslaughts, we leave
behind smaller and less diverse communities. And beyond polluting the world
with unwanted sensory stimuli, we're also removing natural stimuli that
animals have come to depend on, flattening the undulating sensescapes that
have generated the wondrous variety of animal Umwelten.
Consider Lake Victoria, in East Africa. It is home to more than 500 species
of cichlid fish that are found nowhere else. That extraordinary diversity
arose partly because of light. In deeper parts of the lake, light tends to
be yellow or orange, while blue is more plentiful in shallower waters.
These differences affected the eyes of the local cichlids and, in turn,
their mating choices. The evolutionary biologist Ole Seehausen found that
female cichlids from deeper waters prefer redder males, while those in the
shallows are drawn to bluer ones. These diverging penchants acted like
physical barriers, splitting the cichlids into differently colored forms.
Diversity in light helped create diversity in vision, in color, and in
species. But over the past century, runoff from farms, mines, and sewage
filled the lake with nutrients that spurred the growth of clouding, choking
algae. The old light gradients flattened in some places, the cichlids'
colors and visual proclivities no longer mattered, and the number of
species collapsed. By turning off the light in the lake, humans also
switched off the sensory engine of diversity, contributing to what
Seehausen has called "the fastest large-scale extinction event ever
observed."
As those species go extinct, so too do their Umwelten. With every creature
that vanishes, we lose a way of interpreting the world. Our sensory bubbles
shield us from the knowledge of those losses. But they don't protect us
from the consequences. In the woodlands of New Mexico, the ecologists
Clinton Francis and Catherine Ortega found that the Woodhouse's scrub-jay
avoids the noise of compressors used in extracting natural gas. The
scrub-jay spreads the seeds of piñon pine trees, and a single bird can bury
thousands of pine seeds a year. They are so important to the forests that,
in quiet areas where they still thrive, pine seedlings are four times more
common than in noisy areas they have abandoned, Francis and colleagues
found in a later study.
2 black and white photos: a clown fish; a prairie dog holding up its paws
with very long claws next to its face
Left: As babies, clown fish use sounds to find their way to the safety of a
coral reef. Right: To avoid excessive noise, prairie dogs spend more time
underground. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
Piñon pines are the foundation of the ecosystem around them-a single
species that provides food and shelter for hundreds of others, including
Indigenous Americans. To lose three-quarters of them would be disastrous.
And because they grow slowly, "noise might have hundred-plus-year
consequences for the entire ecosystem," Francis tells me.
A better understanding of other creatures' senses can show us how we're
defiling the natural world-and can also point to ways of saving it. In
2016, the marine biologist Tim Lamont (formerly Tim Gordon) traveled to
Australia's Great Barrier Reef to begin work for his doctorate. Lamont
should have spent months swimming amid the corals' vivid splendor. Instead,
a heat wave had forced the corals to expel the symbiotic algae that give
them nutrients and colors. Without these partners, the corals starved and
whitened in the worst bleaching event on record, and the first of several
to come. Snorkeling through the rubble, Lamont found that the reefs had
been not only bleached but also silenced. Snapping shrimp no longer
snapped. Parrotfish no longer crunched. Those sounds normally help guide
baby fish back to the reef after their first vulnerable months out at sea.
Soundless reefs were much less attractive.
Lamont feared that if fish avoided the degraded reefs, the seaweed they
normally eat would run amok, overgrowing the bleached corals and preventing
them from rebounding. He and his colleagues set up loudspeakers that
continuously played recordings of healthy reefs over patches of coral
rubble. The team would dive every few days to survey the local animals.
After 40 days, he ran the numbers and saw that the acoustically enriched
reefs had twice as many young fish as silent ones and 50 percent more
species. They had not only been attracted by the sounds but stayed and
formed a community. "It was a lovely experiment to do," Lamont says. It
showed what conservationists can accomplish by "seeing the world through
the perceptions of the animals you're trying to protect."
From the July 2019 issue: The last of its kind
Lamont's experiment was possible only because the team managed to record
the sounds of the healthy reefs before they were bleached. Natural
sensescapes still exist. There is still time to preserve and restore them
before the last echo of the last reef fades into memory. And in most cases,
the work ahead of us is considerably simpler. Instead of adding stimuli
that we have removed, we can simply remove those that we added. Radioactive
waste can take millennia to degrade. Persistent chemicals like the
pesticide DDT can thread through the bodies of animals long after they are
banned. Plastics will continue to despoil the oceans even if all plastic
production halts tomorrow. But light pollution ceases as soon as lights are
turned off. Noise pollution abates once engines and propellers wind down.
Sensory pollution is an ecological gimme-a rare example of a planetary
problem that can be immediately and effectively addressed. And in the
spring of 2020, the world did unknowingly address it.
black and white 3/4 photo of underside of salamander with its front right
leg by its eye and mouth and front left leg downalong its side
The body clock of the barred tiger salamander is disrupted by artificial
light at night. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
As the coronavirus spread, public spaces closed. Flights were grounded.
Cars stayed parked. Cruise ships stayed docked. About 4.5 billion
people-almost three-fifths of the world's population-were told or
encouraged to stay home. As a result, many places became substantially
darker and quieter. With fewer planes and cars on the move, the night skies
around Berlin were half as bright as normal. Alaska's Glacier Bay, a
sanctuary for humpback whales, was half as loud as the previous year, as
were cities and rural areas throughout California, New York, Florida, and
Texas. Sounds that would normally be muffled became clearer. City dwellers
around the world suddenly noticed singing birds.
Read: Artificial lights tell the story of the pandemic
In a multitude of ways, the pandemic showed that sensory pollution can be
reduced if people are sufficiently motivated-and such reductions are
possible without the debilitating consequences of a global lockdown. In the
summer of 2007, Kurt Fristrup and his National Park Service colleagues did
a simple experiment at Muir Woods National Monument, in California. On a
random schedule, they stuck up signs that declared one of the most popular
parts of the park a quiet zone and encouraged visitors to silence their
phones and lower their voices. These simple steps, with no accompanying
enforcement, reduced the noise levels in the park by three decibels,
equivalent to 1,200 fewer visitors.
To perceive the world through others' senses is to find splendor in
familiarity, and the sacred in the mundane.
To truly make a dent in sensory pollution, bigger steps are needed. Lights
can be dimmed or switched off when buildings and streets are not in use.
They can be shielded so that they stop shining above the horizon. LEDs can
be changed from blue or white to red. Quiet pavements with porous surfaces
can absorb the noise from passing vehicles. Sound-absorbing barriers,
including berms on land and air-bubble curtains in the water, can soften
the din of traffic and industry. Vehicles can be diverted from important
areas of wilderness, or they can be forced to slow down: In 2007, when
commercial ships in the Mediterranean began slowing down by just 12
percent, which saves fuel and reduces emissions, they produced half as much
noise. Such vessels can also be fitted with quieter hulls and propellers,
which are already used to muffle military ships (and would make commercial
ones more fuel-efficient).
We could regulate industries causing sensory pollution, but there's not
enough societal will. "Plastic pollution in the sea looks hideous and
everyone is worried, but noise pollution in the sea is something we don't
experience so directly, so no one's up in arms about it," Lamont says. And
as we desecrate sensory environments, we grow accustomed to the results.
Our blinding, blaring world becomes normal, and pristine wilderness feels
more distant.
But the majesty of nature is not restricted to canyons and mountains. It
can be found in the wilds of perception-the sensory spaces that lie outside
our Umwelt and within those of other animals. To perceive the world through
others' senses is to find splendor in familiarity, and the sacred in the
mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard garden, where bees take the measure of
a flower's electric fields, leafhoppers send vibrational melodies through
the stems of plants, and birds behold the hidden palettes of ultraviolet
colors on their flock-mates' feathers. Wilderness is not distant. We are
continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor, and to
protect.
black and white close-up photo of face of white barn owl
Barn owls track prey using stiff facial feathers that funnel sound toward
their ears. (Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic)
In 1934, after considering the senses of ticks, dogs, jackdaws, and wasps,
Jakob von Uexküll wrote about the Umwelt of the astronomer. "Through
gigantic optical aids," he wrote, this unique creature has eyes that "are
capable of penetrating outer space as far as the most distant stars. In its
Umwelt, suns and planets circle at a solemn pace." The tools of astronomy
can capture stimuli that no animal can naturally sense-X-rays, radio waves,
gravitational waves from colliding black holes. They extend the human
Umwelt across the universe and back to its very beginning. The tools of
biologists are more modest in scale, but they, too, offer a glimpse into
the infinite. Scientists have used night-vision goggles to show that
nocturnal bees can see in extreme darkness, clip-on microphones to
eavesdrop on the vibrational songs of leafhoppers, and electrodes to listen
in on the pulses of electric fish. With microscopes, cameras, speakers,
satellites, and recorders, people have explored other sensory worlds. We
have used technology to make the invisible visible and the inaudible
audible.
No creature could possibly sense everything, and no creature needs to.
Evolving according to their owner's needs, the senses sort through an
infinity of stimuli, allowing through only what is relevant. To learn about
the rest is a choice. The ability to dip into other Umwelten is our
greatest sensory skill. A moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in
its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost
knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp,
a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never
understand what it is like to be a bat. We will never fully do any of these
things either, but we are the only animal that can try. Through patient
observation, through the technologies at our disposal, through the
scientific method, and, above all else, through our curiosity and
imagination, we can try to step into perspectives outside our own. This is
a profound gift, which comes with a heavy responsibility. As the only
species that can come close to understanding other Umwelten, but also the
species most responsible for destroying those sensory realms, it falls on
us to marshal all of our empathy and ingenuity to protect other creatures,
and their unique ways of experiencing our shared world.
This article has been adapted from Ed Yong's latest book, An Immense World:
How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. It appears in the
July/August 2022 print edition with the headline "Our Blinding, Blaring
World."
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around UsED
YONG, RANDOM HOUSE
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