Editorial: Marine invertebrates and sound

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Marine invertebrates and soundThe growing pressure from anthropogenic activities impacts organisms at their communities and ecosystems levels.Among these stressors, the recent introduction of artificial noises in the oceans affects their inhabitants, altering their metabolism, deriving in malfunctions of physiological processes, or in behavioural disruptions.These dramatic changes may lead to significant transformations at population levels and negatively influence the whole oceanic ecosystem.Sound is an important sensory modality for marine organisms, especially because other senses (vision, smell or taste) may be limited due to information loss in aquatic habitats.While marine mammals and fishes have received a great scientific attention in the last three decades, our knowledge of the biological significance of sound perception and production in marine invertebrates is scarce.Most of them are able either to produce and/or detect sounds through specialised hearing organs, or mechanoreceptors, which respond to the kinetic component of the sound.In some species, sounds can have various ecological functions (e.g.communication, territorial, social and sexual behaviour, species recognition), but it is generally considered that they are produced as a reaction to environmental stressors (predatorsprey, alarm or stress reactions).Similarly, hearing sensitivity and its related behavioural patterns are little known.Marine invertebrates play a central role in food webs and ecosystem services, as well as represent an important economical resource.Recent findings have shown that invertebrates are sensitive to anthropogenic noise.Noise can cause physical injuries, physiological stress, alterations of embryonic and larval development, changes in behaviour, reduction of growth and reproduction, increase of mortality and decrease of ecological success.These effects can have long-term consequences for the survival and adaptation of marine invertebrates in an increasingly noisy ocean, and indicate that this sensitivity may have a direct consequence on ocean biodiversity, placing them as direct indicators of ocean health.There is a clear need for more research to progressively assess the risks generated by noise exposure and to identify the gaps in knowledge on the potential effects that noise exposure may trigger in marine invertebrates.This Research Topic aims at contributing to the advancement of our scientific knowledge on marine invertebrate bioacoustics and their implications for biodiversity and the functioning of marine ecosystems.The papers under this Research Topic show the Frontiers in Marine Science frontiersin.