Abstract
When environments change rapidly, adaptive phenotypic plasticity can ameliorate negative effects of environmental change on survival and reproduction. Recent evidence suggests, however, that plastic responses to human‐induced environmental change are often maladaptive or insufficient to overcome novel selection pressures. Anthropogenic noise is a ubiquitous and expanding disturbance with demonstrated effects on fitness‐related traits of animals like stress responses, foraging, vigilance, and pairing success. Elucidating the lifetime fitness effects of noise has been challenging because longer‐lived vertebrate systems are typically studied in this context. Here, we follow noise‐stressed invertebrates throughout their lives, assessing a comprehensive suite of life history traits, and ultimately, lifetime number of surviving offspring. We reared field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus , in masking traffic noise, traffic noise from which we removed frequencies that spectrally overlap with the crickets’ mate location song and peak hearing (nonmasking), or silence. We found that exposure to masking noise delayed maturity and reduced adult lifespan; crickets exposed to masking noise spent 23% more time in juvenile stages and 13% less time as reproductive adults than those exposed to no traffic noise. Chronic lifetime exposure to noise, however, did not affect lifetime reproductive output (number of eggs or surviving offspring), perhaps because mating provided females a substantial longevity benefit. Nevertheless, these results are concerning as they highlight multiple ways in which traffic noise may reduce invertebrate fitness. We encourage researchers to consider effects of anthropogenic disturbance on growth, survival, and reproductive traits simultaneously because changes in these traits may amplify or nullify one another.