科学美国人60秒 双头蠕虫告诉我们关于进化的一些有趣的事情（在线收听）

Two-Headed Worms Tell Us Something Fascinating About Evolution

双头蠕虫告诉我们关于进化的一些有趣的事情

Ashleigh Papp: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I'm Ashleigh Papp.

You might say that Guillermo Ponz is a scientific monster hunter–even though he thinks that term, “monster” never really captured his subjects right.

阿什利·帕普：这是《科学美国人》的60秒科学，我是阿什利·帕普。

你可能会说吉列尔莫·庞兹是一位科学怪兽猎人——尽管他认为“怪兽”这个词从来没有真正正确地捕捉到过他的对象。

Guillermo Ponz: So they're regular animals that have gone through different developmental processes that would end up building a body, that is not what you expect.

吉列尔莫·庞兹：所以它们是正常的动物，经历了不同的发育过程，最终形成了一个身体，这不是你所期望的。

Papp: What this researcher based in Madrid, Spain, actually loves, is the oddly amazing animals. After all, he studies two-headed worms.

帕普：这位来自西班牙马德里的研究人员真正喜欢的是那些奇怪的神奇动物。毕竟，他研究的是双头蠕虫。

Ponz: We have these worms that are usually regular worms like with one head and one tail, that's normal, but sometimes they may have two heads or two tails. And on the other side, there are worms, which have one head and many tails always.

庞兹：我们有这些蠕虫，通常是普通的蠕虫，比如一头一尾，这很正常，但有时它们可能有两个头或两条尾巴。另一边是蠕虫，它们总是有一个头和许多尾巴。

Papp: Officially, he looks at bifurcated annelids, meaning things like earthworms that have come out of their larval stage with two heads, or spontaneously sprouted two tails, or ... some other combination of mixed up appendages.

帕普：正式地说，他研究的是分叉环节动物，意思是蚯蚓从幼虫阶段出来时有两个头，或者自发地长出两条尾巴，或者。。。其他一些混合的附属物的组合。

We know that certain species, like some salamanders and insects, have the ability to regrow appendages in a time of need. But there's this one phylum of worms, the annelids, that can re-grow unlike anything else that we've ever seen in the kingdom.

我们知道某些物种，比如一些蝾螈和昆虫，有能力在需要的时候再生附属物。但是有一门蠕虫，环节动物，可以重新生长，这与我们在王国中见过的任何其他动物都不一样。

Their segmented bodies, like an earthworm with rows of ringed compartments, help them easily regrow a new head or tail at the first sign of trouble.

它们分节的身体，就像一条有一排环形隔间的蚯蚓，帮助它们在遇到麻烦的第一个迹象时很容易再生出新的头部或尾巴。

Or even crazier, they can regrow an entirely new right side of their body if sliced in half.

Ponz: … worms that do these crazy things that are very weird, very, you know, very, very strange things that these worms should not, quote-unquote, should not do.

甚至更疯狂的是，如果将它们切成两半，它们可以再生出全新的右侧身体。

庞兹：……蠕虫做这些疯狂的事情，非常奇怪，非常，你知道，非常非常奇怪的事情，这些蠕虫不应该，不应该，不应该做。

Papp: Once Ponz started studying the anatomically death-defying lengths to which these worms would go to grow and survive, he was totally pulled in.

帕普：一旦庞兹开始研究这些蠕虫生长和存活的解剖学上的不死长度，他就完全被拉了进去。

And he realized that he and his team weren’t the first to be fascinated. Ponz found that there was a golden age of research on “monster creatures” during the 18th and 19th centuries.

他意识到他和他的团队并不是第一个被迷住的人。庞兹发现，18世纪和19世纪是研究“怪物生物”的黄金时代。

Ponz: ... 100 plus year old literature would refer to the sentiments of monsters, creatures, or monsters, or oddities or, you know, they're, they're all these these variations that describe them. And in the end, these these animals are not not monsters.

庞兹：。。。100多年前的文学作品会提到怪兽、生物、怪兽或怪事的情感，或者，你知道，它们是，它们都是这些描述它们的变体。最后，这些动物不是怪物。

Papp: A fixation with the “reanimated Monster” makes sense, especially back then. Author Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, was published in 1818, and it only further intensified interest–and some of that interest translated into actual research.

帕普：对“复活的怪物”的痴迷是有道理的，尤其是在当时。作家玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley）的小说《弗兰肯斯坦》（Frankenstein）于1818年出版，这只会进一步增强人们的兴趣——其中一些兴趣转化为实际研究。

Ponz and a team of international researchers conducted a wide-sweeping review of the existing knowledge about monster worms. They dove into 275 years' worth of research — combing through scientists' observational journals, reading historical texts, and even reaching out to the broader scientific community to see if anyone knew anything about records of abnormal worms.

They wanted to understand all of the different types and patterns of bifurcation and see if there were any clues about how the oddities developed.

庞兹和一个国际研究团队对现有的关于怪物蠕虫的知识进行了广泛的回顾。他们潜心进行了275年的研究——梳理科学家的观测期刊，阅读历史文献，甚至接触更广泛的科学界，看看是否有人知道任何关于异常蠕虫的记录。

他们想了解分叉的所有不同类型和模式，看看是否有关于这些奇怪现象如何发展的线索。

Their search landed them in a jackpot of both history and science.

They came across documents and drawings of bifurcated worms from around the world — in Latin, French and German, all the way to Russian, Japanese, and even Indonesian. All in all, they spent over a year working through the archives, translating old texts, and following the trail of monster worm clues.

他们的搜寻使他们在历史和科学上都中了大奖。

他们从世界各地——拉丁语、法语和德语——一直到俄语、日语，甚至印度尼西亚——找到了分叉蠕虫的文件和图纸。总之，他们花了一年多的时间翻阅档案，翻译旧文本，追踪怪物蠕虫的线索。

What they learned is that bifurcation in worms has been observed in over 60 species of worms across the annelid family tree, and in some species, up to 20% of the juveniles ended up with some form of bifurcation. This work was recently published in the journal Biological Reviews. [Guillermo Ponz-Segrelles et al., Monsters reveal patterns: bifurcated annelids and their implications for the study of development and evolution]

他们所了解到的是，在环节动物家谱的60多种蠕虫中观察到了蠕虫的分叉，在某些物种中，多达20%的幼体最终出现了某种形式的分叉。这项研究最近发表在《生物学评论》杂志上。

Ponz: And that means, for example, in the in the case of bifurcation, that when an animal is cut, and is regenerating, for example, the tail, there needs to be some mechanism that specifies where this tail is going to be, how it's going to be oriented, what is posterior, what is anterior, what is left, what is right, what is dorsal, what is ventral. And these mechanisms can be disturbed. And these might lead to different anatomies.

庞兹：这意味着，例如，在分叉的情况下，当一个动物被切割，并且正在再生，例如尾巴，需要有某种机制来指定这条尾巴将在哪里，它将如何定位，什么是后，什么是前，什么是左，什么是右，什么是背，什么是腹。这些机制可能会受到干扰。这些可能会导致不同的解剖结构。

And that gives us clues about what is important during this process. Of course, these are the baby steps. So we are just pointing towards this process, this phenomenon, we are saying, Okay, hello, this happens, there are these animals that are doing these weird things. We should not forget about them, let's look into them.

这为我们提供了在这个过程中什么是重要的线索。当然，这些是婴儿步。所以我们只是指向这个过程，这个现象，我们说，好吧，你好，发生了这种情况，有一些动物正在做这些奇怪的事情。我们不应该忘记他们，让我们调查一下。

Papp: They also realized that there's a strong correlation between the type of bifurcation and the internal organ development. Meaning, the way that the worms were split reliably indicated if extra sets of organs were present.

帕普：他们也意识到分叉的类型和内脏器官的发育之间有很强的相关性。也就是说，如果存在额外的器官，蠕虫分裂的方式可以可靠地指示。

With this type of intel, Ponz and his team were able to essentially draw up a blueprint, or how-to guide, for reliably and repeatedly creating bifurcated worms ... which is potentially a very useful resource for scientists interested in studying the mechanisms of development.

有了这种类型的英特尔，庞兹和他的团队基本上能够绘制出一个蓝图，或如何指导，可靠地重复创建分叉蠕虫。。。对于有兴趣研究发育机制的科学家来说，这可能是一个非常有用的资源。

This long-forgotten study of worm developmental anomalies seems poised for a comeback. According to Ponz, this information could extend far beyond the annelid and even insect worlds to help us better understand how things like growth and development actually happen ... in both the normal and the monster ways.

这项长期被遗忘的蠕虫发育异常研究似乎即将卷土重来。据庞兹说，这些信息可以远远超出环节动物甚至昆虫的世界，帮助我们更好地理解生长和发育等事情是如何发生的。。。以正常和怪物的方式。

Ponz: In a sense, we are now following this trend that they started then, studying these animals to try to understand bigger pictures in nature. Usually development leads to a certain way to assert them to a certain point. So you have a development that ends up in anatomy that's more or less conserved. But sometimes it doesn't. And that can teach us something about development processes. And that's interesting.

庞兹：从某种意义上说，我们现在正遵循他们当时开始的趋势，研究这些动物，试图了解大自然中更大的画面。通常情况下，发展会导致以某种方式将它们坚持到某一点。所以你有一个发展，最终在解剖学上，或多或少是保守的。但有时不是。这可以教我们一些关于开发过程的知识。这很有趣。

Papp: For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I’m Ashleigh Papp.

帕普：这是《科学美国人》的60秒科学，我是阿什利·帕普。