How does pollution affect animals?

Many animals are dying because of pollution. All types of environmental pollution have negative impact on animal's health, and the worst types of pollution are air, water and noise pollution. Even small levels of environmental pollution create discomfort for many animals while on the other hand more excessive pollution leads to diseases and deaths of animals.

Air pollution is particularly dangerous to animals when in form of the acid rain. Acid rains kills fish in lakes and streams by increasing the acidity of water. Other forms of air pollution such as ozone are also harmful to animals, for instance ozone pollution can cause serious damage to lung tissues of many animals.

Water pollution has extremely negative impact on many animals. Water polluted with different chemicals can cause decline of population in some species (such as frog), while on the other hand water polluted with nutrients can lead to huge growth of toxic algae which when eaten by other animals may cause serious diseases and death to these animals.

Noise pollution is also becoming huge problem for many animals, especially animals that live in our oceans and seas. Because of the increased ship traffic and offshore oil drilling noise pollution has started affecting very large number of marine animals. Whales and dolphins are among animals most affected by noise pollution. This is because they use their sense of hearing for many purposes such as hunting for prey, navigation, migration and distinguishing the members of the same species and with so many artificial sounds in our oceans they are having tough time to distinguish them all.

Littering can also lead to death of many animals because of toxic substances in trash (for instance motor oil, detergents, pesticides) that once eaten by animals often lead to their deaths. Animals can also die by getting themselves entangled in many of the litter items people dump into our environment.