2005年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-Great White Makes Marathon Swim（在线收听） |
| Great White sharks get around,a lot more than scientists thought. A new study in the journal Science shows that the great whites move farther and faster than anyone believed.That is important because it could be influenced the way humans try to protect the sharks.In recent years,the market for great white fins,jaws and meat has exploded.NPS John Nelson has the story. Four years ago, marine biologist Ramon Bonfil started throwing buckets of chum(鱼饵) off the side of a research boat near the coast of South Africa.Whenever a great white shark would swim over to snuff down the blood in the fish parts.Bonfil would lean out and hook a sophisticated tracking probe onto its dorsal fin. The shark would swim off and the probe will begin taking thousands of measurements a day.Water temperature changes in direction,speed,depth and light.Then after several monthes the probe would pop off and float up to the surface. And that when it turns on to transmit and starts transmitting all a summary of all the data that it collected during those 6 monthes or whatever period it was on,on the shark．Satellites bounced this data down into / Bonfil's office at the wildlife conservation society in NewYork. There he charted the movements of some thirty great white sharks,some of them,as expected,stayed near established feeding grounds on the south African coast.Others,less expectedly,swam back and forth through thousands of miles of African coastal waters.Then,one of these South African sharks shows up in an impossible location--several thousand miles away off the east coast of Australia.Bonfil's first thought was that it must be a data glitch. Maybe something went wrong, maybe the satellite did something strange and you double check, triple check and it's all right. At that point,Bonfil started jumping up and down in his office,screaming for joy.Nobody had ever seen a great white shark do anything like this before. These sharks:"It didn't just fumble on Australia by chance."it knew that it was going there, it had a sense of direction and it was very determined going [color=red]/ and went extremely fast. Bonfil says the fifteen-foot female shark made its journey to Australia in 3 monthes,then even more amazingly it turned around and came home.Ever since even though the shark is a female, he has been calling it the Lance Armstrong of the ocean except that it has got much bigger teeth.So much for the theory that the great white sharks stayed close to established feeding grounds.Jack Music is a shark expert at the Virgina Institute of marine science. Australia has protected the great white shark and the south Africa has but now we are seeing that the migration of one individual may take it away outside of the area where is protected and then leave it vulnerable to being taken in fisheries. Music says it's possible that the great white sharks make lots of trips like this one , Why is anybody’s guess right now .But he does have working theory. It probably had a hot date on Australia's coast,that is my suspicion.You are serious. It will.It couldn have gone there to mate. What ever the reason.Music says it's now clear that the sharks need more than piecemeal protections.And it's true that this study has already had an impact.Several monthes ago,delegates to a UN convention on trade in endangered species heard about Bonfil's marathon shark.Afterwards they formally declared the great white shark/ a threatened species.That group is now closely monitoring the shark trade. |
| 原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2005/40651.html |