Some birds are so stressed by noise pollution it looks like they have PTSD

I would like to kick the person responsible for the big bass sound that travels so far. Hard.

by Sarah Kaplan January 9, 2018

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“Noise is causing birds to be in a situation where they're chronically stressed . . . and that has really huge health consequences for birds and their offspring,” said Rob Guralnick, associate curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

It would be a stretch to say noise hurts birds' mental health — the animals have not been evaluated by an avian psychologist. But in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Guralnick and his colleagues say there is a clear connection between noise pollution, abnormal levels of stress hormones, and lower survival rates.

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Humans suffering from PTSD or chronic fatigue syndrome, and lab mice that have been put through traumatic experiences, respond by muting their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis — the cascade of chemical responses that is triggered by stress.

“You can imagine being in a state of constant arousal and hypervigiliance,” Lowry explained. “If there was not some way to desensitize these systems, that would result in a state of chronic fatigue. No organism is capable of essentially running on turbo all the time. So after a period of time the physiology adapts — perhaps to conserve resources.”

It's an adaptation to an untenable situation, Lowry said, but not a particularly good one; this tamping down of the HPA axis is tied to an overall deterioration of health. A human is likely to experience cardiovascular problems, gastrointestinal issues, extreme fatigue.

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