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Tsunami¹ Sent Species on a Transoceanic Trip

海啸引发的物种跨洋迁移

The massive earthquake that rocked Japan in March 2011 took thousands of lives. It sent tsunami waves more than a hundred feet high towards northern Japan, where they battered² the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant—and swallowed up whole swaths of coastline.

2011年3月，日本发生的大地震夺去了数千人的生命。地震在日本北部诱发的高达100多英尺的海啸巨浪袭击了福岛第一核电站，并吞噬了整个海岸线。

"Large amounts of villages and towns and cities washed into the ocean." Jim Carlton, a marine³ ecologist at Williams College. "Huge amounts of infrastructure⁴, fisheries facilities, aquaculture. From children's toys, to fisheries baskets, to many vessels⁵, buoys⁶, containers, everything one can imagine."

“大量的村庄、小镇和城市被冲入大海。”威廉姆斯学院的海洋生态学家吉姆·卡尔顿说道。“大量的基础设施、渔业设施、水产养殖设施。从儿童玩具、渔场篮筐，到大量船只、浮标、集装箱，人们能想象到的一切都被冲入大海。”

Time and ocean currents have delivered hundreds of those objects to U.S. shores. Along with the stuff living in and on them: mussels, anemones⁷, barnacles, crustaceans⁸, worms—even a few fish, caught swimming in boats. Carlton and his team have now recovered more than 600 pieces of that debris⁹, with the help of a huge network of scientists and citizen volunteers, and catalogued the hitchhiking Japanese species. The full manifest—289 species in all—is listed in a report in the journal Science.

时间和洋流将数百个这些物体冲到了美国海岸。连带着的还有寄居在它们上面和里面的生物：贻贝、海葵、藤壶、甲壳纲动物、蠕虫——甚至还有一些在船上游泳的鱼。在一个大型的科学家和公民志愿者团体的帮助下，卡尔顿和他的团队找到了600多块这种物体的残骸，并对这些“搭便车”来的日本物种进行了分类。这些物体的完整清单——289种物种均被列在了《科学》杂志上的一篇报告中。

While it’s hard not to admire their tenacity¹⁰, some of these transplants could pose a danger to local species: "It's really ecological¹¹ roulette. It's really a matter of any number of species which have no prior history at all of becoming nuisance species, becoming invasive."

除了佩服他们的坚韧，我们还发现其中一些移植物可能会对当地物种构成威胁：“这是真的生态轮盘赌。而且这个物种的数量是任意的，它们在没有任何历史的情况下，突然就成为了有害物种，变得具有侵略性。”

And as we clutter¹² our coastlines with more and more development, and the ocean rips it away—as happened to Texas and Florida this month—Carlton says we can expect more of these ecological experiments, tsunami or not.

伴随着对海岸线的不断开发，然后又被海洋不断冲走——卡尔顿表示，正如这个月发生在德克萨斯州和佛罗里达州的情况一样，不管有无海啸我们都将面临更多此类生态问题。