猫鼬正在患上气候病(上)

This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是凯伦·霍普金。

Climate change. It’s the culprit behind an increase in droughts and floods, wildfires and storms.

气候变化是干旱与洪水、野火与暴风雨增加的罪魁祸首。

And a new study shows that it’s making more meerkats come down with tuberculosis.

一项新的研究表明，这会使更多的猫鼬患上肺结核。

The findings appear in the journal Nature Climate Change.

这一发现发表在《自然气候变化》杂志上。

So tuberculosis is an endemic disease in meerkats.

结核病是猫鼬会得的一种地方性疾病。

It has been present in the population since meerkats have been studied.

自从对猫鼬进行研究以来，这种疾病就一直存在于猫鼬种群中。

Maria Paniw is a researcher at the Donana Biological Research Station in Spain.

玛丽亚·帕尼乌是西班牙多纳纳生物研究站的研究员。

She says that for meerkats living in the Kalahari, TB outbreaks have been on the rise.

她表示，对于生活在卡拉哈里沙漠的猫鼬来说，结核病疫情一直在上升。

Coincidentally, so have the local temperatures.

巧合的是，当地的温度也是一直在上升。

So we wanted to know whether there was a link between climate change, which you know, has been increasing temperature extremes, and increases in tuberculosis outbreaks.

因此，我们想知道气候变化(气候变化导致极端气温升高)是否与结核病暴发之间存在联系。

And how this may affect populations of this social species.

以及这可能会如何影响这种群居物种的种群。

So Paniw and her colleagues crunched the numbers.

因此，帕尼乌和她的同事们快速处理了这些数字。

I was very fortunate to collaborate with the Kalahari Meerkat Project which is a fantastic project where we now have over 22 years of very detailed data on individual meerkats and about their survival, their reproduction, their growth, their movement, and so on.

我很幸运能与喀拉哈里沙漠猫鼬项目合作，这是一个非常棒的项目，我们现在已经掌握了22多年的与猫鼬个体以及它们的生存，繁殖，生长，移动，等等有关的非常详细的数据。

So it’s a very rich data set to work with.

这是一个要处理的非常丰富的数据集。

They used the data to build models to predict how climate change will affect meerkat populations.

他们利用这些数据建立模型，预测气候变化将如何影响猫鼬的数量。

Our main results show that climate change affects meerkats primarily by increasing the likelihood of deadly TB outbreaks.

我们的主要研究结果表明，气候变化主要通过增加致命结核病暴发的可能性来影响猫鼬。