科学美国人60秒 新研究破译了海牛的隐藏语言（在线收听）

New Research Decodes the Sea Cow's Hidden Language

新研究破译了海牛的隐藏语言

Ashleigh Papp: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I'm Ashleigh Papp.

OK — listen to this:

Ashleigh Papp: ... If you had to guess, what would you say made those sounds? ... Did you guess that they were from a blubbery, 10-foot long sea cow, otherwise known as a manatee? If you didn't get it, don't be too hard on yourself.

That's what manatees sound like when they're communicating in the warm, shallow waters around Florida. And researchers are starting to learn how to decode this crazy high-pitched chatter.

Ashleigh Papp：这是《科学美国人》的 60 秒科学，我是 Ashleigh Papp。

好的——听听这个：

Ashleigh Papp：......如果你不得不猜测，你会说什么发出这些声音？ ...您是否猜到它们来自一头 10 英尺长的胖海牛，也称为海牛？ 如果你没有得到它，不要对自己太苛刻。

这就是海牛在佛罗里达附近温暖的浅水区交流时发出的声音。 研究人员开始学习如何解读这种疯狂的高音喋喋不休。

We know that manatees produce vocalizations via the vocal folds in their throat, similar to how humans and other mammals produce noise. They use their voices for talking to each other–and probably not for echolocating, like dolphins do. And while previous research has documented the noises, new work l  looked into connecting how manatee chatter in the wild is related to behavior in different social settings.

我们知道海牛通过喉咙中的声带发出声音，类似于人类和其他哺乳动物产生噪音的方式。 他们用自己的声音互相交谈——而且可能不像海豚那样用于回声定位。 虽然之前的研究已经记录了这些噪音，但我的新工作正在研究将野外海牛喋喋不休与不同社会环境中的行为联系起来。

Beth Brady, a marine mammalogist at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Florida ran the new research. She says that manatees use vocalizations to convey all sorts of things ... kind of like the way a house pet lets you know that they're not into that new brand of food, or they're really happy to see you at the end of a long day.

佛罗里达州莫特海洋实验室和水族馆的海洋哺乳动物学家贝丝·布雷迪 (Beth Brady) 进行了这项新研究。 她说海牛用发声来传达各种各样的东西……有点像家养宠物让你知道他们不喜欢那种新品牌的食物，或者他们很高兴最后见到你 漫长的一天。

Beth Brady: If you have a dog or a cat, you can tell by the way your cat meows, or your dog barks, whether or not it wants to go outside, whether it wants to play, but they're still using that bark, or just that meow. And Manatees are the same way ... they change the pitch of the sound and the structure of the sound just a little bit to convey different meanings.

贝丝·布雷迪：如果你养了一只狗或一只猫，你可以通过你的猫叫声或狗叫声来判断它是否想出去，它是否想玩，但它们仍在使用这种叫声 ，或者只是那个喵。 和海牛是一样的……它们只是稍微改变声音的音高和声音的结构，以传达不同的含义。

Ashleigh Papp: Manatees are solitary marine herbivores. They spend a lot of time grazing in shallow waters ... hence, their affectionate nickname, the "sea cow". According to Brady, manatees are generally shy, gentle creatures that can be difficult to approach in the wild and therefore, tough to really study.

Ashleigh Papp：海牛是孤独的海洋食草动物。 他们花很多时间在浅水区放牧……因此，他们亲切的绰号“海牛”。 根据布雷迪的说法，海牛通常是害羞、温和的生物，在野外很难接近，因此很难真正研究。

All in all, Brady and her team spent about seven years recording manatee vocalizations. They would drop a hydrophone off the side of a kayak while they paddled through fields of seagrass or cruised near freshwater river mouths. And they would also jot down notes about what the manatees were doing while they were making noise.

总而言之，布雷迪和她的团队花了大约七年的时间来录制海牛的发声。 当他们划过海草田或在淡水河口附近巡航时，他们会从皮划艇的一侧放下一个水听器。 他们还会记下海牛在制造噪音时所做的事情

The team analyzed each of the recordings using computer software built for bioacoustic research and conservation work. They dissected the soundwaves of each vocalization and looked at things like how long the call lasted and each sound’s frequencies. They learned that 99% of the vocalizations that they recorded fell into 3 types of sound.

该团队使用为生物声学研究和保护工作而构建的计算机软件分析了每个录音。 他们解剖了每个发声的声波，并研究了诸如通话持续了多长时间和每个声音的频率之类的东西。 他们了解到，他们录制的 99% 的发声属于 3 种类型的声音。

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

而且由于每个录音都附有对海牛在通话时行为的观察，他们能够将某些噪音与特定行为联系起来。 这就是他们开始理解喋喋不休的方式。

The squeal, or [Audio of a "squeal"], was the top call recorded during cavorting, or social play and frisky behavior.

尖叫声或 [“尖叫声”的音频] 是在嬉戏、社交游戏和活泼行为期间记录的最高呼叫。

Stressed out manatees almost exclusively produced this noise [Audio of a "squeak"], which is described by Brady and her team as the squeak.

This call, the high squeak, [Audio of a "high squeak"], was mostly used between a mother manatee and her calf.

压力过大的海牛几乎完全产生了这种噪音 [“吱吱声”的音频]，布雷迪和她的团队将其描述为吱吱声。

这个叫声，高声，[“高声”的音频]，主要用于海牛母亲和她的小牛之间。

The findings were published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. [Beth Brady, et al., Behavior related vocalizations of the Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris)]

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

这些新信息在许多不同的方面都很有用。 海牛是所谓的“基石物种”。 这意味着通过更好地了解这一物种的行为方式，研究人员可以更多地推断佛罗里达沿海生态系统的整体健康状况。

Brady: ... 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. But sea grasses are also important for other species, you have sport and game fish, who use seagrass beds for those or juvenile nurseries. You have other animals, such as sea horses who use that, and it's food for turtles as well. So when you lose manatees, you're also losing it's also an indicator for general health of an ecosystem.

布雷迪：... 举个例子，印度河泻湖地区的海草消失了，许多海牛不幸因此而死亡。 但海草对其他物种也很重要，你有运动鱼和野味鱼，它们将海草床用于那些或幼年托儿所。 您还有其他动物，例如使用它的海马，它也是海龟的食物。 因此，当您失去海牛时，您也会失去它，这也是生态系统总体健康状况的指标。

Ashleigh Papp: There’s also the issue of climate change. Marine ecosystems are changing rapidly around the world because of it. Understanding the manatee's hidden language might offer us a sonic warning system that we never knew existed.

Ashleigh Papp：还有气候变化问题。 因此，世界各地的海洋生态系统正在迅速变化。 了解海牛的隐藏语言可能会为我们提供一个我们从未知道存在的声音警告系统。

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. Whether or not there's a universal manatee language remains to be seen ... but we're starting to understand that there's a lot more to manatee squeaking and squealing than pure chatter.

布雷迪还说，他们从佛罗里达海牛身上学到的东西对于了解和保护世界上其他研究较少的海牛群体很有用。 是否有一种通用的海牛语言还有待观察……但我们开始明白海牛的尖叫声和尖叫声比纯粹的喋喋不休要多得多。

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

这是《科学美国人》的 60 秒科学，我是 Ashleigh Papp。