墨尔本PTE素材库——African Penguins Pulled into an Ecological Trap

African Penguins Pulled into an Ecological Trap

中文批注

这篇关于企鹅的文章，讲述了在海洋环境变化的印象下，African Penguins难以觅食的情况。在下列词汇表的帮助下，理解这篇文章的内容并不难，那么在理解之后，大家来试着的summarize一下吧！

在平时积累的过程中，大家要注意，类似于phytoplankton, zooplankton这一类的专业名词，就不用特别的花时间的和心思啦~ 当然如果能混个眼熟，能大致了解意思，也是能够帮助大家理解的。但是真的要去死记硬背拼写之类的就没有特别大的意义啦！

AIL的PTE素材库，会给各位PTE的考生们准备一些素材库，让大家在PTE为数不多的复习素材之外还能有些内容可以练习。这些素材不仅可以用来做听力的练习，也可以用来积累的词句，或者尝试着做一下总结。希望大家都能在PTE考试中取得目标分数！

【Key vocabulary】

Shore: n. 海滨，支柱

Hatch: Vt. 孵化

Anchovy: 凤尾鱼，鳀鱼

Sardine: 沙丁鱼

Chlorophyll: [植] [生化] 叶绿素

Phytoplankton: [植] 浮游植物

Zooplankton: 浮游动物

Mirage: n. 海市蜃楼，幻想，幻影

Anthropogenic: adj. 人为的，人类起源的

Dispersal: n. 分散，传播，散布

Fledge: Vt. 长羽毛

Translocate: Vt. 改变…的位置，转运

Chick: n. 小鸡，小鸟，雏鸡

Vortex: n. 涡流，漩涡，旋风

Full Transcript

Climate change and overfishing have made the penguins’ feeding grounds a mirage—which has led to a drop in penguin population. Jason G. Goldman reports. 

Over millions of years, penguins have evolved a keen sense of where to find food. Once they’re old enough, they set off from the shores on which they hatched for the first time and swim long distances in search of tasty fish like anchovies and sardines. But they don’t search directly for the fish themselves.

For example, when young endangered African penguins head out to sea, they look for areas with low surface temperatures and high chlorophyll. Because those conditions signal the presence of phytoplankton. And lots of phytoplankton means lots of zooplankton, which in turn means lots of their favourite fish. Well, that’s what it used to mean.

Climate change plus overfishing have made the penguin feeding grounds a mirage. The habitat is indeed plankton-rich—but now it’s fish-poor. Researchers call this kind of scenario an “ecological trap.”

“It’s a situation where you have a signal that previously pointed an animal towards good quality habitat. That habitat’s been changed, usually by rapidly induced human pressures, usually anthropogenic change – and the signal stays, but the underlying quality in the environment deteriorates.”

University of Exeter zoologist Richard Sherley. He and his team used satellite imaging to track the dispersal of 54 recently fledged African penguins from eight sites along Southern Africa. Historically, the birds benefitted from tons of fish off the coasts of Angola, Namibia, and Western South Africa, but now they’re going hungry.

“I was really hoping we’d see them going east, and finding areas where the fish had shifted to…so I was quite surprised to be wrong, and unfortunately quite sad to be wrong. It ends up being quite a sad story for the penguins.”

The researchers calculate that by falling into this ecological trap, African penguin populations on South Africa’s Western Cape have declined by around 80%. The findings are in the journal Current Biology. [Richard B. Sherley et al. Metapopulation Tracking Juvenile Penguins Reveals an Ecosystem-wide Ecological Trap]

Some research groups are exploring the idea of translocating chicks to a place where they can’t get trapped, like the Eastern Cape. But Sherley thinks that a longer-term solution means implementing regulations to create more sustainable fisheries, something that he says has public support.

And as for the penguins?

“There’s not necessarily yet in an extinction vortex. So it’s not hopeless yet.”

But time flies. Unlike penguins.

—Jason G. Goldman

(Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/african-penguins-pulled-into-an-ecological-trap/)