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ABSTRACT
The Romanian coastal area of the Black Sea presents all types of artificial noise sources (ranging from naval activities, to military applications, construction activities, drilling platforms etc.,) with strong effect on acoustic sensitivity of hydrobionts. In this paper we present the influence of antropogenie sound on the physiological activity of the Round goby (Apollonia Neogobius) melanostomus, Pallas, 1814) kept in cages. The analysis of some biochemical indicators for the oxidative stress (superoxid dismutase, catalase, reduced glutathione and malonildialdehide) performed on liver tissue of the round goby from the Black Sea exposed to different qualities of antropogenie noise, indicated that in shallow waters parts of the Black Sea, where goby fishes (with different species, characteristic for each biotope) are the dominant fish species, noises/vibrations with high intensity are harmful for the ecosystem.
Keywords: Apollonia (Neogobius) melanostomus, oxidative stress, noise, spectrogram, physiological activity, goby fishes, Black Sea
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper presents the results of the MUNROM project as part of RoNoMar (Romanian and Norwegian Maritime Project) which had the following objectives: to determine the ambient underwater noise level in the coastal region and in the harbor areas of the Romanian Black Sea coast, to determine the impact of noise produced by artificial sources on some species characteristic to NW area of the Black Sea: goby, blue mussel, dolphins.
The effect of anthropogenic sounds on fish may vary and depends upon: (1) properties of the sound, such as frequency spectrum, source level, duration, rise and fall times in level, and repetition rate, (2) background noise (masking), (3) sound level, duration and spectrum of the sound as received by the animal, (4) hearing properties of the species (sensitivity, directivity index and critical ratio), and (5) species-specific or individual variation in reaction to sound [13].
For the reasons mentioned above, extrapolation of the effects of anthropogenic sound upon fish are notoriously difficult making the results of an experiment on caged fish to be applicable only to that specific situation. The effects of sound are also known to vary within a species; Popper et al. [15], found that the effect of sound on rainbow trout, tested under the same conditions, varied with groups of fish tested in different years. The reason for this was not entirely clear but...