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Boat Noise Means Fish Can't Learn Their Lessons

If you've ever gone snorkeling or scuba¹ diving—you know how peaceful it sounds under there…... aside from the crackling sound of snapping shrimp².

你如果浮潜或者潜过水，就会知道水下听起来有多么平静……除了噼啪作响的虾。

Compare that to a reef with boat traffic. Not quite as calming. And it gets on undersea creatures' nerves too: stressing out spiny³ lobsters⁴, slowing the development of sea slugs.

把这与船只往来的下暗礁进行比较。都不平静。同时，它也会影响海底生物的神经:给小龙虾施加压力，减缓海蛞蝓的生长。

And now scientists have found one more side-effect of noise: impaired⁵ learning abilities, for fish. The study is in the Proceedings⁶ of the Royal Society B.

现在科学家们又发现了噪音的另外一种副作用:破坏鱼的学习能力。这项研究发表在《英国皇家学会学报B》上。

Researchers started by teaching juvenile⁷ damselfish in the laboratory about the predators⁹ they'd encounter, once they settled on an Australian reef. The training consisted of injecting the damselfishes' tanks with seawater fouled¹⁰ with both the scent¹¹ of a predator⁸, and alarm cues from injured damsel fish. A message that, hey, this predator smell? It means dead friends. Maybe dead you.

研究人员在实验室开始教这些热带小鱼它们会遇到的捕食者，前提是这些小鱼定居在澳大利亚的珊瑚礁上。这次训练包括给达塞尔鱼的水箱注入海水，使其与捕食者的气味浑浊，同时还有受伤的小鱼发出的警报。捕食者可以闻到的信息?这意味着死亡，也许是你。

To reinforce that lesson, they also lowered ziploc bags with the predators themselves into the damselfish's tanks, together with the scents¹², to teach them: these guys are your enemies.

为了强化这一教训，他们还将带着捕食者的密封袋，连同这些气味一起放进了水槽中，来教导小郁们:这些家伙是你的敌人。

They conducted all this training to a soundtrack of peaceful reef sounds or with the added distraction¹³ of buzzing boat engines. And they found that fish that trained with normal reef sounds were suitably spooked by the scent of a predator, later on. But fish exposed to boat noise? Totally unphased.

他们进行了所有训练，播放宁静的珊瑚礁声，或者增加了嗡嗡作响的船只引擎的干扰。研究发现，在正常的礁石上训练的鱼，后来被捕食者的气味所惊吓。但是如果鱼暴露在船的噪音中呢?。结果完全相反。

"It appeared that the presence of boat noise was interfering¹⁴ with the learning process. So when later on we said 'hey, here's a predator, are you scared?' they didn't respond."

看来船上的噪音干扰了学习的过程。”所以当我们说“嘿，这是一个捕食者，你害怕吗?”小鱼们没有回应。”

Maud Ferrari, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Saskatchewan. She says same thing held true in the real world, too, once they released the fish. Three days later, two thirds of the quiet-trained fish were still alive. Compared to only 20 percent of the fish trained with the boat noise backdrop…the same severe mortality rate suffered by fish with no training at all.

萨斯喀彻温大学的行为生态学家莫德·法拉利说道，同样的事情在现实世界中也是一样的，一旦将这些小鱼释放。三天后，三分之二的经过训练的鱼仍然活着。但与只有接受训练船噪声背景20%的鱼相比…两者的死亡率相同。

The silver lining¹⁵, Ferrari says, is boat noise is a stressor that local legislators can actually regulate. "You want to change the environment, slow down the warming, the acidification, but it's really out of our hands, you know what I mean? The results we found with noise pollution, what is nice is it's one of those stressors we can actually control."

法拉利说，银色的衬里是船只噪音是一个应激源，当地立法者实际上可以调节。“你想改变环境，减缓气候变暖，酸化，但这真的是我们无法控制的，你明白我的意思吗?”我们在噪音污染中发现的可喜的是我们可以控制的压力源。

So that young fish can learn their lessons. Alone or in schools.

这样的话小鱼就可以学习了。单独或者集体学习都可以。