科学美国人60秒 SSS 珊瑚可以遗传共生适应气候变暖（在线收听）

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 marine 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 ecosystems 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 bleaching event. Bleaching occurs when the waters around corals become too cold, or too salty, or too hot—but mostly, too hot. And then, the symbiotic algae that live inside corals—which are photosynthetic 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 nutritional source, so they're essentially 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 hardier algae proliferate. That change offsets the damage caused by the exodus of the more sensitive species... a process called "shuffling."

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 affected 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 intensity 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。