Suffering in receivers: negative effects of noise persist regardless of experience in female anurans

1. Anthropogenic noise is widespread, and growing evidence suggests that it can negatively affect animals through many different mechanisms including masking of cues and signals, distraction, and aversion to noise. 2. Acoustic masking has received the most attention from researchers and recent evidence suggests that masking effects can be mitigated by alteration of signal frequencies or amplitudes by signalers. Additionally, alteration can be a learned response via prior experience with noise exposure. However, it remains unclear whether distraction or aversive effects due to noise can be mitigated by prior experience with noise, especially among signal receivers. 3. Here, we addressed this gap by separating mechanisms of noise disturbances on female phonotaxis towards male advertisement calls in anurans. To do this, we experimentally examined phonotaxis of gravid females that differ in their prior experience with noise under three acoustic manipulations: spectrally overlapping and non-...