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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
The astonishing vanishing act of the glassfrog, revealed
Jesse Delia says it happened in Panama. A few years back, he was finishing up his field work — a research project examining the parental2 behavior of a type of glassfrog. He brought a handful of these transparent3, half dollar-sized frogs to the lab for a photo shoot.
It led to an exciting discovery.
"I wanted to get some photos of a pretty glassfrog belly4," Delia tells NPR. He placed them in a Petri dish and saw each frog's circulatory system through its translucent5 skin — "red with red blood cells."
But when he came back later, the frogs were sleeping and the blood "was gone."
It was as if the arteries6 and veins7 had just melted away. "I thought it was crazy," recalls Delia, now a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
He took a video of the glassfrog's pumping heart and sent it to his longtime collaborator8, Carlos Taboada, a biologist at Duke University.
"It was colorless," Taboada says. Not even the telltale red streak9 of a vessel10 in the frog's belly was visible. "It was insane. I had never seen anything like that."
Both Delia and Taboada wanted to know — where'd all the frogs' red blood go?
In a new paper in the journal Science, Taboada, Delia and their collaborators offer an answer: "They hide most of their red blood cells in their liver," Delia explains.
During the day, while the glassfrogs are asleep on green leaves, they're vulnerable to predators11, so they achieve camouflage12 by becoming super transparent. (Their livers, among other organs, are coated in highly reflective white crystals.) Since their red blood cells are transporting very little oxygen, Delia says the frogs likely have "some alternative process that allows them to keep their cells alive during transparency." Then, at night, when the frogs become active, "feeding and mating, going about their regular business," the vitreous amphibians13 release their red blood cells back into circulation.
Taboada says the frogs "pack roughly 90% of their red blood cells in a really, really small volume. Normally, those conditions can trigger some clotting14 disorders15." The researchers say that knowing how the glassfrogs avoid a blood clotting cascade16 could pave the way for new anticoagulants for humans.
1 transcript | |
n.抄本,誊本,副本,肄业证书 | |
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2 parental | |
adj.父母的;父的;母的 | |
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3 transparent | |
adj.明显的,无疑的;透明的 | |
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4 belly | |
n.肚子,腹部;(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分,膛 | |
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5 translucent | |
adj.半透明的;透明的 | |
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6 arteries | |
n.动脉( artery的名词复数 );干线,要道 | |
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7 veins | |
n.纹理;矿脉( vein的名词复数 );静脉;叶脉;纹理 | |
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8 collaborator | |
n.合作者,协作者 | |
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9 streak | |
n.条理,斑纹,倾向,少许,痕迹;v.加条纹,变成条纹,奔驰,快速移动 | |
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10 vessel | |
n.船舶;容器,器皿;管,导管,血管 | |
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11 predators | |
n.食肉动物( predator的名词复数 );奴役他人者(尤指在财务或性关系方面) | |
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12 camouflage | |
n./v.掩饰,伪装 | |
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13 amphibians | |
两栖动物( amphibian的名词复数 ); 水陆两用车; 水旱两生植物; 水陆两用飞行器 | |
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14 clotting | |
v.凝固( clot的现在分词 );烧结 | |
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15 disorders | |
n.混乱( disorder的名词复数 );凌乱;骚乱;(身心、机能)失调 | |
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16 cascade | |
n.小瀑布,喷流;层叠;vi.成瀑布落下 | |
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