水下录音展示一头鲸的故事
By eavesdropping on the calls of blue whales, researchers hope to get a more accurate picture of the massive mammals' distribution and abundance.
通过窃听蓝鲸的呼叫，研究人员希望能够更准确地了解这种大型哺乳动物的分布和数量。
撰稿/播音Christopher Intagliata
翻译张心茹
审校：张清越
One of the drawbacks of researching blue whales is that most of the time you can't see what your study subjects are doing, or how many there are—or even, where they are. Satellite tags have revealed some of their diving behavior and where they migrate. But tags will never give a complete picture of the population at large.
研究蓝鲸的一个困难是大多数时候你都看不到你的研究对象在做什么，或者有多少 - 甚至是在哪里。卫星标签显示了他们的一些潜水行为和迁徙地点。但标签永远不会完整呈现种群的全貌。
"Because it's really hard to fit a tag on a whale." Ana Širović, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We have 121 tags that have been deployed on blue whales. And we're talking about 16 or so years of field work. So it's not realistic to think we can just go out and tag all the animals and figure out that way how many there are."
因为在鲸鱼上安标签真的很难。” Scripps海洋学研究所的海洋学家AnaŠirović说。 “我们已经在蓝鲸身上安装了121个标签，这已是16年左右野外工作的成果，所以认为可以凭借标记所有的蓝鲸，得知他们的数量是不现实的。”
But Širović is using another method to track the underwater giants—eavesdropping on their songs and calls. <> (That's sped up so you can hear it by the way—much of the sound they produce is outside of our hearing range.)
但Širović正在使用另一种方法来追踪水下巨人 - 窃听他们的语音。 “B型呼叫”（它们产生的大部分声音都超出了我们的听力范围，因此这是提高频率后的音频，以便您听见。）
Širović and her team analyzed more than a decade's worth of blue whale sound. And found that in general, males seemed to be more vocal than females <
Širović和她的团队分析了超过十年的蓝鲸声音。结果发现，一般来说，雄性似乎比雌性更有声。“D型呼叫”尤其是在晚上......也许是因为他们更喜欢白天捕食。
"In a way, it's kind of like they don't like to speak with their mouth full. When they're feeding, they're focusing on that, and when they start calling, that's what they're doing."
“从某种意义上说，这种现象类似于他们不喜欢在嘴巴装满食物时说话。它们会在捕食时专注捕食，而呼叫时也专注于呼叫。”
And though no one's actually seen blue whales having sex, Širović says this song <–B call>> may have something to do with it: when the whales are getting more in the mood during the year, that song gets more common. She presented these findings at the recent 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon. [Ana Širović et al., Insights into blue and fin whale acoustic behavior from fixed passive acoustic recorder and tag data]
虽然没有人看到蓝鲸发生过性行为，但Širović说“A型呼叫-B型呼叫”可能与它有关：当一年中鲸鱼的情绪越来越高时，这种叫声更加普遍。她在最近于俄勒冈州波特兰举行的2018年海洋科学会议上介绍了这些发现。
Širović's goal is bigger than simply understanding the way whales communicate. "Ultimately the idea is we'd be able to say, 'oh look, there's X number of calls in this area, and we know that means that that is Y number of animals.'" And thus use sound to better understand the lives of these most elusive of study subjects.
Širović的目标比简单理解鲸鱼沟通方式更宏大。 “最终的想法是，我们可以说，'哦，看，这个区域有X种呼叫，我们知道这意味着那是多少头鲸鱼。'”并且因此使用声音来更好地理解这些最难以捉摸的研究对象的生命过程。
—Christopher Intagliata
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京ICP备11000850号
京公网安备11010502039775号 信息网络传播视听节目许可证0111611号
国家科技基础条件平台