Dragonflies can’t hear, but they still don’t like noise. When Japanese and American researchers played traffic sounds in areas without roads, and measured the effects on local wildlife—birds, grasshoppers and dragonflies, which sense only vibrations—they found that the sounds reduced the number and diversity of species present. “These results suggest that noise pollution not only affects acoustically oriented animals,” write the researchers, “but that noise may reverberate through biological communities.”
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