Every second since the beginning of mankind, humans have evolved alongside technology. These “technologies” are basically for human benefits, which have already transformed the way people live dramatically. Though, did you know that these technologies are frequently disturbing animal behavior and their lives? The two primary human technologies that will be handled here are noise pollution and light pollution, both affecting animal behavior, migration, and their survival.

Artificial Lights

Artificial lights are one of the critical factors that affect animals. Specifically, scientists describe this artificial light at night (ALAN), which hinders animals' perception of when, how much, and the color of something, particularly when it’s time to rest, feed, and migrate. The mechanics of ALAN are: 1. At night, when it’s supposed to be dark, artificial lights illuminate the surrounding environment, which is critical for nocturnal animals. 2. Since many of the lights are turned on till nighttime, it disturbs the natural dawn cycles. 3. Since the main type of LED lights(cool white spectrum) spreads through the atmosphere easily, it also easily takes away the natural darkness that the wildlife needs. These are some specific examples of how the light affects the animals: When the baby sea turtles are hatched, they use the natural lights(sunlight or moonlight) that reflect on the horizon to reach the ocean, but the majority of hatchlings mispercept the artificial lights (ex. lamps around shores and lights from nearby hotels) as the natural lights which leads to them dying due to road kills or predations. Consequently, this unintended disaster caused by artificial lights greatly affects the population of these endangered turtles. ​​ During the migrating season for some nocturnal birds, they are attracted to the artificial lights in urban cities, which leads to a few hundred thousand deaths by collision with the light-reflecting buildings every year. Many of the insects are disrupted in their navigation by the lights that disturb their mating and feeding activities, and reducing these activities decreases the population of insects, key pollinators, and a food source for animals. Therefore, it leads to the decline in plants due to the loss of pollinators, and it also affects the population of other animals that have insects as their main prey. These effects of artificial lights were revealed by the scientists using satellites.

Artificial Noises

Artificial noises, known as Anthropogenic sound, also negatively affect the animals. These sounds mainly disturb animals’ communication, change behavior, and give physiological stress, which reduces reproduction and survival over time. One of the animals that is sensitive to artificial noise is the whale. Many whales use low-frequency calls that travel deep underwater, but fishing ships with enormous propellers produce enormous sounds that mask the whales sounds. NOAA Institutional Repository found out that Military Sonar on ships confuses some of the whales' navigation, stranding them, even showing that the sonar triggered the panic and abnormal behavior of whales diving. Consequently, these noises and sonars from ships brought consequences such as loss of communication, loss of mating opportunities, displacement from their own habitat, and direct mortality, leading to absolute chaos. Birds communicate with their own songs through frequencies, but songs are also easily overlapped by traffic and urban noises. When noises are covered, the birds start to sing at a higher pitch, louder, and even at different times. Over time, this change in the birds’ singing behavior brings consequences such as mating failure, which directly lowers the reproduction rate of birds. Now these were mostly long-term effects of human technologies. Here are some that directly receive the effect of human noises: fish use sound and lateral line to sense predators, but boat engines and other noises from human activities impair the reflexes of fish. The worst case is for fish embryos, as they are highly sensitive to tiny vibrations; their physiological responses(heart rate) change due to the vibration of the noise, which directly affects their development.

In conclusion, the majority of animals require natural darkness and quietness, but most of our technologies take it from animals, which brings negative consequences. Therefore, humans should take actions to alleviate such issues that technology has against nature. For instance, people could decrease the speed of ships for ocean creatures to have natural communications and mating timings. If these kinds of actions are practiced frequently over time, animals will recover from the damage that they have received.