科学美国人60秒 SSS Humans Are Superpredators in the Landscape of Fear
时间：2018-12-24 作者：英语课 分类：2016年Scientific American(八)月
Small carnivores—like foxes or raccoons or badgers 1—are themselves prey 2 for larger predators 4—like wolves. So they spend time hiding instead of hunting. This influence that big predators have on their ecosystem 5 is called a "landscape of fear." But humans are wiping out most of the world's big predators. Which you might assume is good news for the small ones.
But some researchers think that humans exert our own landscape of fear. Those foxes, raccoons and badgers just keep on hiding—only now, they're hiding from us. In reality, the situation may be far worse.
“Humans kill these smaller carnivores, so things like raccoons and foxes that we have here in North America, European badgers that they have in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, and we kill them at a rate that's four times greater than their conventional large carnivore predators…”
Liana Zanette of Western University in London, Ontario.
"Because our killing 6 of these smaller carnivores is kind of off the scale, we're considered the superpredator."
To see how humans have altered the landscape of fear, Zanette and her team traveled to a small forest that’s home to lots of European badgers near Oxford 7 in the U.K. They used hidden speakers to broadcast the sounds of bears and wolves—two historic predators, both of which are no longer a threat. They also played the sounds of sheep, dogs and people. Hidden cameras recorded the badgers’ willingness to look for food outside of their burrows 8 as those sounds were played.
They discovered that the badgers have retained some of their fear of bear sounds, and know that dogs still pose a threat. But they've lost their fear of wolves.
"They treated the wolf calls just like the sheep calls."
Despite their fear of bears and dogs, the badgers still eventually went out to eat amid their sounds. But when they heard people "they would not emerge from their burrows at all until the human sounds were completely off. So they would cower 9 in their burrows for the two hours that the sounds were on, waiting for those human sounds to go off."
In other words, they were leery of bears but were downright terrified of us. The findings are in the journal Behavioral Ecology. [Michael Clinchy, Liana Y. Zanette, et al. Fear of the human "super predator 3" far exceeds the fear of large carnivores in a model mesocarnivore]
"The badgers recognize who their enemies are…they have recognized humans as their principle threat."
—Jason G. Goldman
- Badgers had undermined the foundations of the church. 獾在这座教堂的地基处打了洞。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- And rams ' skins dyed red, and badgers' skins, and shittim wood. 5染红的公羊皮，海狗皮，皂荚木。 来自互联网
- Stronger animals prey on weaker ones.弱肉强食。
- The lion was hunting for its prey.狮子在寻找猎物。
- The final part of this chapter was devoted to a brief summary of predator species.本章最后部分简要总结了食肉动物。
- Komodo dragon is the largest living lizard and a fearsome predator.科摩多龙是目前存在的最大蜥蜴，它是一种令人恐惧的捕食性动物。
- birds and their earthbound predators 鸟和地面上捕食它们的动物
- The eyes of predators are highly sensitive to the slightest movement. 捕食性动物的眼睛能感觉到最细小的动静。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- This destroyed the ecosystem of the island.这样破坏了岛上的生态系统。
- We all have an interest in maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem.维持生态系统的完整是我们共同的利益。
- Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
- Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。
- At present he has become a Professor of Chemistry at Oxford.他现在已是牛津大学的化学教授了。
- This is where the road to Oxford joins the road to London.这是去牛津的路与去伦敦的路的汇合处。