VOA常速英语2019--昆虫对地球生命至关重要

A growing number of the Earth’s insect population now exists only in collections like these. Nobody’s seen those 400 years. A new review of over 70 studies of insect populations suggests that human pressures are causing insect populations to plummet 1 by as much as a quarter every decade. Some of my colleagues have compared it to playing Jenga, you know. You remove pieces from the Jenga tower and everything seems to be okay. And then you remove one piece and the whole thing falls down. And you don’t know which piece in advance that’s going to be and once you’ve removed it, you can’t put it back again. So the loss of species is inevitably 2 concerning, because often we don’t know what those species are doing. We don’t know what other species are depending on them.

地球上越来越多的昆虫种群现在只存在于这样的藏品中。人类已经有400年没见过这些昆虫了。回顾了70多项有关昆虫种群的研究后发现，人类造成的压力正在导致昆虫种群数量急剧减少——每10年减少1/4。我的一些同事将这种情况比喻为积木叠塔游戏。从塔里抽出几块积木之后，似乎一切安然无恙。等再拿掉一根的时候，整个塔都会垮掉。我们事先不会知道哪根积木会是那个临界点，但一旦这个“临界点”拿走了，就覆水难收了。所以，物种的消失让人极为担忧，因为通常情况下，我们不知道这些物种的作用，也不知道有哪些物种是依赖这些物种才能生存的。

Insects make up the largest class of animals on earth, and represent more than half of all known living organisms. They are incredibly diverse, and in many ways make life on Earth possible. Bees and butterflies pollinate our food, flowers and trees. They feed all kinds of larger animals, including humans. And insects play a vital role in the decomposition 3 of all kinds of organic matter, from leaves to roadkill. Their collapse 4 is being driven by human activity, everything from traffic to industrial farming and pesticides 5 to light pollution. Scientists say doing nothing to solve the problem is not an option. A large number of the crops we eat and rely on are pollinated by insects. So imagine a world where that pollination 6 process is not taking place.

昆虫是地球上最庞大的一类动物，占已知生物数量的半数以上。昆虫种类五花八门，而且从很多角度来看，昆虫是地球上许多其他生命存在的前提；蜜蜂和蝴蝶可以为我们的粮食、花朵和数目授粉，也是各种较大体积动物的食物，包括人类在内；此外，昆虫还有一个关键的作用就是分解各类有机物，从树叶到路毙的动物，不一而足。昆虫数量减少的罪魁祸首是人类活动，比如交通拥堵、工业化养殖、杀虫剂的使用、轻污染的存在。科学家表示，我们不能坐以待毙。人类赖以为是的大量庄稼都是由昆虫授粉的。我们不敢想象没有授粉的世界会是什么样子。

And there are some cases already around the world where we are having to pollinate by hand, at huge cost, a huge economic cost, simply because the insects aren’t there to do the work that we would normally ask them to do for free. And in some cases if you’re talking about food crops, just trying to imagine the scale of what that would look like if insects weren’t doing that for us. One big caveat 7, all of the studies come from industrialized countries in Europe and North America.

世界上已经有一些案例出现，即耗费巨资，手动授粉，因为没有昆虫做授粉的工作。而正常情况下，昆虫授粉是免费的。还有一些人在讨论粮食作物的时候，会试着想象如果没有昆虫的授粉，我们的粮食产量会是怎样的光景。这里有一个重大警告：所有这些研究都是欧洲和北美洲的工业化国家的手笔。

The researchers say they simply don’t have the data to census 8 the robust 9 insect species in more tropical regions. But in these industrialized countries, the report predicts that all insect species could be gone in a century.

这些地方的科学家说，他们没有数据，无法对更广阔的热带地区的健壮昆虫种类做普查统计。但这份报告预测，在这些工业化国家里，所有的昆虫物种都会在一个世纪内消失殆尽。