Anthropogenic noise reshapes community stability by disrupting parental care-mediated trophic feedbacks

Anthropogenic noise is an emerging and pervasive sensory pollutant that acts as a potent stressor for many animal species, leading to detrimental effects on behavior and physiology. Although numerous studies have examined its physiological consequences, its implications for community stability remain less well understood, particularly when noise disrupts parental care and thereby propagates through trophic interactions. Here, we develop a tri-trophic theoretical framework to examine how anthropogenic noise alters parental care and, in turn, affects community stability through trophic interactions. The model couples a resource exhibiting logistic growth, a stage-structured consumer with parental care, and a predator. Using equilibrium, local stability, and bifurcation analyses, we characterize the dynamical responses of the system to variation in parental care, noise intensity, predator mortality, and resource growth. Parental care promotes consumer persistence and enlarges the region of stable coexistence, whereas noise weakens this stabilizing effect by reducing effective juvenile recruitment. Predator mortality plays an important role in driving critical transitions in community stability: as mortality increases, the system shifts among stable coexistence, bistability, and predator-extinction regimes. Increasing noise intensity destabilizes the coexistence equilibrium that prevails at low predator mortality, giving rise to oscillatory coexistence. Furthermore, increasing resource growth rate drives a shift from stable coexistence to bistability and, ultimately, to periodic oscillatory dynamics. A two-parameter stability analysis reveals four distinct ecological regimes-predator extinction, bistability, stable coexistence, and oscillatory coexistence-and shows how noise-impaired parental care shifts the boundaries among them.