科学美国人60秒:麦克风听海洋动物声音-托福听力下载

　　科学美国人60秒中文翻译：

　　My colleagues and I always joke that one of the Jacques Cousteau movies starts out with something like the ocean is a silent place. 我和同事们经常拿雅克·伊夫·库斯托的一部电影开场白中所说海洋是沉默的这句话开玩笑。

　　And, you know, it's anything but silent. 而且你知道，海洋可绝对不沉默。

　　Kate Stafford is a biologist and oceanographer at the University of Washington. 凯特·斯塔福德是华盛顿大学的生物学家及海洋学家。

　　And she and her colleagues have been cataloguing that soundscape of the deep—like these bowhead whales and bearded seals. 而她和她的同事们一直致力于将弓头鲸及髯海豹等深海生物的声音登记在册。

　　They're using an array of underwater microphones near the Bering Strait, a natural choke point for underwater traffic headed from the Pacific to the Arctic and back. 她们在往返太平洋及北极地区水下交通要道的白令海峡底部安装了大量水下麦克风。

　　And in some ways, she says, listening is a better way to census the Arctic than seeing. 而她表示在北极进行的某些研究方面，听是一种比看更好的方式。

　　You can record sounds underwater at night,when the region is ice coverd. 你可以在夜晚、狂风、甚至寒冷的冰层时记录水下声音。

　　So we're able to eavesdrop all year round. 这样我们就可以全年聆听动物发出的声音。

　　And you can hear animals much further underwater than you could, say, see them from the surface of the water. 而同水面观察、描述相比，在海底聆听声音可以让我们进一步了解动物。

　　But in the last five years of underwater recordings, Stafford says, no two years have been the same in terms of which species they hear, and when they hear them. 但斯塔福德表示在最近5年的海底录音过程中，研究人员在2年时间里没有听到过发出的声音的相同物种。

　　And as arctic ice retreats, species like humpbacks and killer whales are staying north longer—as late as early November—which she says would not have been possible just a few decades ago. 而且北极冰的消退造成座头鲸及虎鲸等物种在北极停留的时间增加，一直到11月初，这样的情况在几十年前根本不可能发生。

　　They even found humpbacks singing mating songs up in Arctic waters which they used to think happened only down in tropical breeding grounds. 他们甚至发现了在北极水域发出吸引异性声音的座头鲸，而她们认为这出求偶剧只在热带的繁殖地才会上演。

　　The team presented these findings November 2 at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, in Jacksonville, Florida. 在12月2日佛罗里达州杰克斯维尔的美国声学学会的会议上，研究人员们展示了这项研究的成果。

　　If polar bears and walrus might be the ecological losers as it were in terms of sea ice loss, a lot of the larger whales seem to be taking advantage of this system. 海冰消失可能会造成北极熊及海象境况濒危，但许多大型的鲸类动物却能利用这点。

　　It's a really good time to be a bowhead, as a colleague of mine says. 我的一位同事调侃道这对弓头鲸而言简直是太美妙了。

　　But uncertainty is the name of the game with Arctic change. 但北极变化的核心就是不确定性。

　　We'll see if it continues to be a good time to be a bowhead as more and more sub-Arctic whales move north to compete in Arctic waters. 随着越来越多的鲸鱼返回北极在这片海域竞争，我们将拭目以待弓头鲸是否能继续享受美好时光。

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