科学美国人60秒 破译海牛语言的秘密(2)

They learned that 99% of the vocalizations that they recorded fell into 3 types of sound.

他们了解到，他们记录的99%的声音可分为三种类型。

And because each recording was attached to an observation of the manatee's behavior at the time of the call, they were able to relate certain noises with specific behaviors.

因为每个录音都是与海牛在发出叫声时的行为观察联系在一起的，所以他们能够将特定的声音与特定的行为联系起来。

And that’s how they started to make sense of the chatter.

这就是他们开始理解这些叫声的原因。

The squeal, or..., was the top call recorded during cavorting, or social play and frisky behavior.

像这样的尖叫声, 是在它们嬉戏游玩、进行社交游戏、欢闹活动中记录的高音。

Stressed out manatees almost exclusively produced this noise, which is described by Brady and her team as the squeak.

压力过大的海牛几乎只会发出这种声音，布雷迪和她的团队把这种声音称为短促的尖叫声。

This call, the high squeak, was mostly used between a mother manatee and her calf.

这种叫声，高的尖叫声，主要用于母海牛和小牛之间。

The findings were published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.

这项研究结果发表在《海洋哺乳动物科学》杂志上。

This new information is useful in a lot of different ways.

这个新信息在很多方面都很有用。

Manatees are what's known as a "keystone species."

海牛被称为“关键物种”。

This means that by better understanding how this one species is doing, researchers can infer a lot more about the overall health of the coastal Florida ecosystem.

这意味着，通过更好地了解这一物种的情况，研究人员可以推断出更多关于佛罗里达沿海生态系统的整体健康状况。

Case in point, there's a lot of seagrass missing from over in the Indian River Lagoon area and a lot of manatees unfortunately perishing due to this.

举个例子，在印第安河潟湖地区有很多海草消失了，很多海牛因此不幸死亡。

But sea grasses are also important for other species, you have sport and game fish, who use seagrass beds for those or juvenile nurseries.

海草对其他物种也很重要，有的鱼用海草床来做运动和游戏，或者用作幼鱼的托儿所。

You have other animals, such as sea horses who use that, and it's food for turtles as well.

还有其他动物，比如用海草的海马，海草也是海龟的食物。

So when you lose manatees, you're also losing...

所以当失去了海牛，也失去了...

It's also an indicator for general health of an ecosystem.

它也是一个生态系统总体健康状况的指标。

There’s also the issue of climate change.

还有气候变化的问题。

Marine ecosystems are changing rapidly around the world because of it.

由于气候变化，全球海洋生态系统正在迅速发生变化。

Understanding the manatee's hidden language might offer us a sonic warning system that we never knew existed.

了解海牛隐藏的语言可能会为我们提供一个我们从未知道的声音预警系统。

Brady also says that the things they learned about the Florida manatees can be useful when it comes to understanding and protecting the other, lesser-studied manatee groups around the world.

布雷迪还表示，他们对佛罗里达海牛的研究对理解和保护世界各地其他较少被研究的海牛群体很有用。

Whether or not there's a universal manatee language remains to be seen.

是否存在一种通用的海牛语言还有待观察。

But we're starting to understand that there's a lot more to manatee squeaking and squealing than pure chatter.

但我们开始明白，海牛的尖叫声不止是纯粹的叫声。

For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I’m Ashleigh Papp.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是阿什利·帕普。