Adapting to a changing environment: Simulating the effects of noise on animal sonification

Adaptation is an important capability in a fast-changing world. What factors allow an animal population to adapt to external changes in their environments? What effects do those changes have on the animal populations that do adapt? This paper explores these questions in the context of intraspecies communication in a noisy soundscape. Using a simulated soundscape and populations generated using Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), the same scenario is played through many times to understand the range of possible outcomes given an initial population and a set of noise conditions. While noise is found to have minimal effect on the best possible scenario, it affects how often that scenario is reached. The onset of noise is also found to impact the complexity of the evolved neural networks.