狼群如何影响森林的生态系统(上)

This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Jason Goldman.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是杰森·戈德曼。

"We literally get down on our hands and knees and start slowly sifting through the leaf litter, looking through bits of hair or a little chunk of bone…

“我们匍匐在地上，开始慢慢地在落叶中筛选，寻找一些头发或一小块骨头……

Tom Gable is tracking a predator. In fact, he’s tracking a whole pack of them.

汤姆·盖博在追踪一个 捕食性动物。事实上，他在追踪一大群动物。

Always, it's very much like a crime scene investigation….

这每次都很像犯罪现场调查....

Since 2015, the University of Minnesota conservation biologist has used GPS collars to track 30 wolves inside Voyageurs National Park.

自2015年以来，这位明尼苏达大学的保护生物学家使用GPS项圈追踪探险家国家公园内的30只狼。

Those collars led Gable and his team to kill sites.

这些项圈引导盖博和他的团队来到捕杀地点。

And there, amid the leaf litter, were bloodied bits of fur and bone … clues about how wolves alter the ecosystems they live, and hunt, and kill in.

在落叶中，有血迹斑斑的皮毛和骨头...这是关于狼如何改变它们生活、追捕和杀戮的生态系统的线索。

The long-term study is, in a way, a quest to broaden a science story that goes back 25 years.

在某种程度上，这项长期研究是为了拓宽25年前的科学故事。

For wildlife ecologists, the story of the reintroduction of wolves to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem on January 12, 1995, has become canonical.

对于野生动物生态学家来说，1995年1月12日将狼重新引入大黄石生态系统的故事已经成为经典。

The story goes something like this: as the elk grew to fear the wolves, they changed where and how they foraged.

故事大致是这样的:当麋鹿越来越害怕狼时，它们改变了觅食的地点和方式。

That gave willows, cottonwoods, and aspens a better chance to grow near streams.

这使得杨柳、三角叶杨和白杨有更好的机会在溪流附近生长。

It also meant more river-side berries for foraging grizzly bears.

这也意味着有更多的河边浆果供灰熊觅食。

And it led to alterations in the flow of those streams, sending water in new directions.

这导致了这些溪流的流动方向发生了改变，将水输送到新的方向。

Wolves outcompete coyotes for access to prey, so coyotes populations plummeted, which led to a rise in fox, rabbit, and ground-nesting bird numbers, and so on.

狼在获取猎物方面胜过草原狼，因此草原狼的数量直线下降, 这导致了狐狸、兔子和地面筑巢鸟类数量的增加, 等等。

Ecologists call this row of biological dominoes a trophic cascade.

生态学家把这一系列生物多米诺骨牌效应称为营养级联。

"Regardless of your inclination, it's hard not to be like, wow this is amazing. If that is true, it's really incredible."

“不管你的倾向如何，很难不发出这样的感叹，哇，这太棒了。 如果这是真的，那真是难以置信。”

New findings cast some doubt on the idea that wolves primarily regulate the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem through fear and intimidation.

新的发现让人们对狼主要通过恐吓和威胁来调节大黄石生态系统的观点提出了一些怀疑。

And regardless of the situation there, very little research has been conducted on this question in ecosystems that don't resemble the mountains and grasslands of Yellowstone.

不管那里的情况如何，在与黄石公园的山脉和草原不同的生态系统中，关于这个问题的研究很少。

Which brings us back to the boreal forests of northern Minnesota, and the ground that Tom Gable and his team have been crawling over the last few years.

这让我们回到了明尼苏达州北部的北方森林，以及汤姆·盖博和他的团队在过去几年里一直在爬行的土地。