Soundbites is a (hopefully) weekly feature of the coolest, newest bioacoustics, soundscape, and acoustic research, in bite-size form. Plus other cool stuff having to do with sound.

Anthropogenic noise has an impact on spider behavior: invertebrates are often overlooked in the anthropogenic noise discussion, but it turns out that intermediate levels of noise can impact prey-detection behavior detrimentally in the garden spider.

Cardinals detect differences in vocalizations adjusted for noise: we do a lot of work on how animals adjust their calls based on anthropogenic noise, but not always on the response of conspecifics to those adjusted calls. Here, cardinals give stronger territorial responses to non-adjusted calls, but lose the ability to distinguish as the environment gets noisier.

A couple of weeks ago, the 2nd International Conference on Environmental Interactions of Marine Renewable Energy Technologies happened in Scotland, and it turns out a few of their talks had to do with marine mammals and noise. Here’s one of them.

Tracking porpoises with underwater arrays is possible: researchers set out see if they can track porpoises by listening to their clicks with an array of hydrophones, and it turns out it worked really well! This has great management implications for figuring out behavior in certain settings.

Fun link of the week: what does the fox actually  say? Hank Green and SciShow give us the scoop.