内容摘要：The killing and ensuing search for Mangione rattled the business community while galvanizing health insurance critics who rallied around him

The killing and ensuing search for Mangione rattled the business community while galvanizing health insurance critics who rallied around him

and other wildlife are. They’re outdoors right in the middle of what must seem to them a war zone — with no escape. And the battleground noises that surround them aren’t merely nuisances; they disrupt the basic instincts the animals’ lives depend on.

Instincts such as those that alert them to the presence of predators become masked under the gas-powered cacophony prevalent throughout most of suburbia.The unnatural sounds can also forceand insects into changing their feeding, nesting and mating habits, says Kevin Munroe, Long Island Preserve Director for The Nature Conservancy, based in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

“Quite a few animals communicate primarily through song, and their songs are how they find each other,” Munroe said. Those with soft and quiet songs, like warblers, small species of owls, bats and some species of crickets, for instance, can be so badly drowned out by noise pollution that “they literally cannot build families or reproduce,” he said.To illustrate the point, Munroe likens the animals’ songs to navigation systems.

“Imagine these songs are the birds’ roadmaps to each other, and imagine you’re using your GPS to get somewhere and all of a sudden it turns off, and that’s the only way you can find your family. Now, with it turned off, there’s no way you’ll find your family. That’s what song is like for these animals,” he said.

Artificial noises from power equipment, traffic, construction and industrial sources, can also cause stress and hearing loss in animals. AThe Washington Department of Natural Resources this week used one of its firefighting helicopters to haul abandoned boats off an uninhabited island in the southernmost reaches of Puget Sound, where the vessels had come to rest after drifting with the currents, and fly them to the mainland to be deconstructed later.

With 14 vessels removed, it was the agency’s largest operation of its kind, officials said.An abandoned ship is lowered from a helicopter on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Olympia, Wash. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

An abandoned ship is lowered from a helicopter on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Olympia, Wash. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)“It was a very, very weird sight,” said Gervais, who owns Boston Harbor Marina, just north of Olympia. “The sail boat with the mast was the weirdest one to see.”