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This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。

A marine¹ heatwave in 2016 killed off a full third of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef system in the world.

2016年发生的海洋热浪杀死了澳大利亚三分之一的大堡礁，大堡礁是世界上最大的珊瑚礁系统。

"It's terrible watching your favorite ecosystems² slowly die."

“看着自已最喜欢的生态系统慢慢死去非常可怕。”

Carly Kenkel is a marine biologist at the University of Southern California who studied that coral bleaching³ event. Bleaching occurs when the waters around corals become too cold, or too salty, or too hot—but mostly, too hot. And then, the symbiotic⁴ algae⁵ that live inside corals—which are photosynthetic⁶ food factories—abandon the corals. Which causes the corals to die.

南加州大学的海洋生物学家卡莉·肯克尔说到，她研究了珊瑚白化事件。当珊瑚周围的海水变得过冷、过咸或过热时，就会发生珊瑚白化现象，不过大多数情况下，珊瑚白化是由海水过热所致。之后，珊瑚礁体内的共生藻类，也就是进行光合作用的食物工厂，会抛弃珊瑚。这会导致珊瑚死亡。

"Because they're losing their nutritional⁷ source, so they're essentially⁸ starving to death."

“因为珊瑚失去了营养来源，所以它们基本上会饿死。”

But coral can house multiple species of algae—some more heat tolerant than others. So sometimes, in the face of stress, the hardier⁹ algae proliferate¹⁰. That change offsets¹¹ the damage caused by the exodus¹² of the more sensitive species... a process called "shuffling¹³."

但珊瑚可以容纳多种藻类，其中一些藻类比其他藻类更耐热。因此，有时在面对压力时，耐寒藻类会大量繁殖。这一变化抵消了更敏感物种大批离开所造成的破坏，这一过程被称为“调整”。

Kenkel and her colleagues studied shuffling in corals affected¹⁴ by the 2016 bleaching event, on the Great Barrier Reef. And they found that adult corals can actually pass those reshuffled algal residents along to their offspring, in their eggs—pointing to a possible way successive generations of coral could adapt to warmer waters.

肯克尔和同事研究了2016年大堡礁白化事件影响下的珊瑚调整。他们发现，成年珊瑚实际上可以将这些重组的藻类居民传给其卵中的后代，这表明存在一种可能方式，即一代又一代的珊瑚可以适应更温暖的海水。

"If your mom can kind of prime you for the environment that you might be experiencing, that presumably would improve your fitness." The details are in the journal Scientific Reports.

“如果你妈妈能让你对可能经历的环境有所准备，那可能会提高你的健康水平。”研究详情发表在《科学报告》期刊上。

So can this help corals beat back bleaching? "The pace of climate change and the frequency and intensity¹⁵ of these stress events is such that I don't think this is enough."

那这能帮助珊瑚击退白化现象吗？“因为气候变化速度如此之快，这些压力事件的频率和强度又如此之大，所以我认为这不足以击退白化现象。”

So in the face of so many threats, even this trick may fail to provide relief for the reef.

因此，面对如此多的威胁，即使是这种方法也可能无法减轻珊瑚礁的压力。

Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。