科学美国人60秒 SSS 海底录音揭示了鲸鱼的故事（在线收听）

Undersea Recordings Reveal a Whale's Tale

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.

研究蓝鲸的一个缺点是，大多数时候你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他们迁移的地方。但标签永远不会完整呈现蓝鲸的全貌。

"Because it's really hard to fit a tag on a whale." Ana ?irovi?, 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."

“因为在鲸鱼上贴标签真的很难。”Scripps海洋学研究所的海洋学家Ana?irovi?说。“我们已经在蓝鲸身上部署了121个标签，而且我们正在谈论16年左右的野外工作情况，所以我们可以出去标记所有的动物，并以这种方式找出标签是不现实的。”

But ?irovi? 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.)?irovi? 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 Especially at night… perhaps because they prefer feeding by day.

但?irovi?正在使用另一种方法来追踪水下巨人——窃听他们的声音和沟通信息。“B型呼叫”(加快速度能让你可以顺便听到——它们产生的大部分声音都超出了我们的听觉范围。)?irovi?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，雄性蓝鲸似乎比雌性蓝鲸更有声音。“D型呼叫”尤其是在晚上......也许是因为他们更喜欢白天喂食。

"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."And though no one's actually seen blue whales having sex, ?irovi? says this song 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.

“从某种意义上说，这有点像他们不喜欢用嘴说话，当他们在喂食时，他们专注于此，而当他们开始打沟通时，他们就是这么做的。”没有人真正看过蓝鲸发生性行为，?irovi?说这种声音“A-B电话”可能与它有关：当鲸鱼在一年中的情绪越来越高时，这种声音会变得更加普遍。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。

?irovi?'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.

?irovi?的目标比简单理解鲸鱼沟通的方式更重要。“最终的想法是，我们可以说，'哦，看，这个区域有X个电话，我们知道那意味着那是多少个动物。'”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活。