海洋动物为什么会吃塑料

Plastic doesn’t just look like food, it smells, feels and even sounds like food.

塑料不仅看起来像食物，它闻起来，摸起来甚至听起来像食物。

In a recent interview about Blue Planet II, David Attenborough describes a sequence in which an albatross arrives at its nest to feed its young.

在蓝色星球第二季的最新采访中，大卫.阿滕伯勒描述了信天翁有序回到巢里饲育幼崽的过程。

“And what comes out of the mouth?” he says. “Not fish, and not squid – which is what they mostly eat. Plastic.”

“它们嘴里吐出来的是什么呢？”他说到。“不是鱼，也不是乌贼—这是它们最常吃的。而是塑料！”

It is, as Attenborough says, heartbreaking.

这用阿滕伯勒的话来说是非常令人痛心的。

It’s also strange.

也是很奇怪的。

Albatrosses forage over thousands of kilometres in search of their preferred prey, which they pluck from the water with ease.

阿滕伯勒追随了上千公里的距离来寻找它们最喜欢的食物，这些信天翁可以轻易地从水里捞取到。

How can such capable birds be so easily fooled, and come back from their long voyages with nothing but a mouthful of plastic?

为什么这种捕食能手的鸟会轻易被愚弄，长途飞行带回来的却是满嘴的塑料呢？

It’s small comfort to discover that albatrosses are not alone.

我们会很忧心地发现这样做的不止是信天翁。

At least 180 species of marine animals have been documented consuming plastic, from tiny plankton to gigantic whales.

从微小的浮游生物到巨大的鲸鱼，至少有180种海洋动物都有吃塑料的记录。

Plastic has been found inside the guts of a third of UK-caught fish, including species that we regularly consume as food.

英国捕捞到的鱼中三分之一的内脏里都 有塑料，包括那些人们经常作为食物的鱼类。

It has also been found in other mealtime favourites like mussels and lobsters.

其他的人们喜爱的海鲜其中物如贻贝和龙虾体内也能找到塑料。

In short, animals of all shapes and sizes are eating plastic, and with 12.7 million tons of the stuff entering the oceans every year, there’s plenty to go around.

简而言之就是，各种形状和大小的动物都在吃塑料，每年有一亿两千七百万吨塑料进入海洋，其中很多都漂浮其中。

The prevalence of plastic consumption is partly a consequence of this sheer quantity.

动物们吃到塑料的普遍性部分就源自这种惊人的数量。

In zooplankton, for example, it corresponds with the concentration of tiny plastic particles in the water because their feeding appendages are designed to handle particles of a certain size.

例如，在浮游动物中，它会反映出水中的塑料微粒的浓度因为它们的捕食器官就是设计成捕获某种大小的微粒的。

“If the particle falls into this size range it must be food,” says Moira Galbraith, a plankton ecologist at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, Canada.

“如果一种微粒处于某种大小范围内，它肯定就是食物了，”莫伊拉.加尔布雷斯说，她是加拿大海洋科学院的浮游动物生态学家。

Like zooplankton, the tentacled, cylindrical creatures known as sea cucumbers don’t seem too fussy about what they eat as they crawl around the ocean beds, scooping sediment into their mouths to extract edible matter.

跟浮游动物相似的，触手类，圆筒形的生物如海参往往不太挑剔吃什么，它们会沿着海床蠕动，将沉积物放入嘴里来提取其中可食用的物质。

However, one analysis suggested that these bottom-dwellers can consume up to 138 times as much plastic as would be expected, given its distribution in the sediment.

然而，考虑到它们分布在海底，一项分析表明这些底栖生物射入的塑料可能是我们预期值的138倍。

For sea cucumbers, plastic particles may simply be larger and easier to grab with their feeding tentacles than more conventional food items, but in other species there are indications that plastic consumption is more than just a passive process.

对海参来说，塑料颗粒可能比通常的食物来说更大也更容易获取，不过其他的物种里，它们可以获得指示，知道吃塑料不仅仅是不好的过程。

Many animals appear to be choosing this diet.

很多动物都好像能够选择自己的食物。

To understand why animals find plastic so appealing, we need to appreciate how they perceive the world.

为了理解为什么动物觉得塑料好吃，我们需要明白它们是怎样感知这个世界的。

“Animals have very different sensory, perceptive abilities to us. In some cases they’re better and in some cases they’re worse, but in all cases they’re different,” says Matthew Savoca at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Monterey, California.

“动物们拥有与我们不同的感官和感知能力。有的方面它们更强，有的方面更弱，不过通常来说都是不同于我们的，”马修.萨沃卡说，他来自加利福尼亚州的蒙特利的美国国家海洋和大气局的西南渔业科学中心。

One explanation is that animals simply mistake plastic for familiar food items – plastic pellets, for example, are thought to resemble tasty fish eggs.

其中一种解释就是动物们简单地误以为塑料是它们熟悉的食物品种—塑料微球，比如说，可能被它们认为像是美味的鱼卵。

But as humans we are biased by our own senses. To appreciate animals’ love of plastic, scientists must try to view the world as they do.

不过正如人类也常被自己的感觉误导一样。为了明白动物们为什么爱吃塑料，科学家需要用它们的眼光来看世界。

Humans are visual creatures, but when foraging many marine animals, including albatrosses, rely primarily on their sense of smell.

人类是视觉的动物，不过当很多海洋动物搜寻食物的时候，包括信天翁，主要依赖的还是嗅觉。

Savoca and his colleagues have conducted experiments suggesting that some species of seabirds and fish are attracted to plastic by its odour.

萨沃卡和同事们进行了实验表明，很多品种的海鸟和鱼是被塑料的味道所吸引。

Specifically, they implicated dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a compound known to attract foraging birds, as the chemical cue emanating from plastic.

他们表示其中特别是二甲基二硫这种化合物吸引了捕食的鸟类，这种化合物会从塑料中散发出来。

Essentially, algae grows on floating plastic, and when that algae is eaten by krill – a major marine food source – it releases DMS, attracting birds and fish that then munch on the plastic instead of the krill they came for.

通常，海藻会生长在漂浮的塑料上，这些海藻会被磷虾吃掉—一种主要的海洋食物来源—它会散发出二甲基二硫吸引鸟类和鱼类来吃，当它们以为吃到的是磷虾的时候实际上吃掉的是塑料。

Even for vision, we can’t jump to conclusions when considering the appeal of plastic.

甚至从视觉上我们也不能轻易对塑料的外表下判断。

Like humans, marine turtles rely primarily on their vision to search for food.

跟人类一样，海龟主要靠视觉来寻找食物。

However, they are also thought to possess the capacity to see UV light, making their vision quite different from our own.

不过，它们也被认为能拥有看见紫外线的能力，所以它们的视野跟我们会有所不同。

Qamar Schuyler at The University of Queensland, Australia, has got into turtles’ heads by modelling their visual capabilities and then measuring the visual characteristics of plastics as turtles see them.

澳大利亚昆士兰大学的卡玛.斯凯勒就通过对海龟的视觉能力建模来理解它们的想法，并测量海龟看见塑料时的视觉特征。

She has also examined the stomach contents of deceased turtles to get a sense of their preferred plastics.

她还检测了死去的海龟胃内容物来研究它们更喜欢哪种塑料。

Her conclusion is that while young turtles are relatively indiscriminate, older turtles preferentially target soft, translucent plastic.

她的结论是幼年海龟通常不太挑剔，而老年海龟更喜欢吃柔软透明的塑料。

Schuyler thinks her results confirm a long-held idea that turtles mistake plastic bags for delicious jellyfish.

斯特勒认为她的结果证实了长期以来的猜想，就是说海龟把塑料袋当成了美味的水母。

Colour is also thought to factor into plastic consumption, although preference varies between species.

颜色也被认为是吃塑料的一个因素，

Young turtles prefer white plastic, while Schuyler and her colleagues found that seabirds called shearwaters opt for red plastic.

小海龟喜欢白色的塑料，同时斯凯勒和同事发现被叫做剪嘴鸥的海鸟喜欢红色的塑料。

Besides sight and smell, there are other senses animals use to find food.

除了视觉和嗅觉，动物们还有其他的感官用来寻找食物。

Many marine animals hunt by echolocation, notably toothed whales and dolphins.

很多海洋动物用回声定位来捕食，典型的有喙鲸和海豚。

Echolocation is known to be incredibly sensitive, and yet dozens of sperm whales and other toothed whales have been found dead with stomachs full of plastic bags, car parts and other human detritus.

回声定位是非常精准的，不过还是有很多的抹香鲸和其他喙鲸因为胃里塞满了塑料袋，汽车零件和其他人类零碎垃圾而死亡。

Savoca says it’s likely their echolocation misidentifies these objects as food.

萨沃卡说仿佛它们的回声定位错把这些塑料当成了食物。

“There’s this misconception that these animals are dumb and just eat plastic because it is around them, but that is not true,” says Savoca.

“有一种误解认为这些动物很笨，仅仅因为周围有塑料它们就吃塑料，不过这是不对的，”萨沃卡说。

The tragedy is that all these animals are highly accomplished hunters and foragers, possessing senses honed by millennia of evolution to target what is often a very narrow range of prey items.

悲剧的是这些动物都是非常高明的猎食和搜寻者，拥有经过上千年进化出的感官来寻找通常比较特定品种的食物。

“Plastics have really only been around for a tiny fraction of that time,” says Schuyler.

“塑料出现的时间相对来说是非常短的，”斯凯勒说。

In that time, they have somehow found themselves into the category marked 'food’.

在这样短的时间内，它们就暂时被划进了食物的门类。

Because plastic has something for everyone.

因为塑料对各个物种来说都有一些吸引力。

It doesn’t just look like food, it smells, feels and even sounds like food.

它不仅看起来像，摸起来甚至听起来都像食物。

Our rubbish comes in such a range of shapes, sizes and colours that it appeals to a similarly diverse array of animals, and this is the problem.

我们的塑料垃圾形状，大小和颜色如此多样以至于它们看起来会像一系列各种动物，这就是问题所在。

Schuyler recalls someone asking, “why don't we make all the plastics blue?”, seeing as experiments suggest this colour is less popular among turtles.

斯凯勒回忆起曾有人问，“为什么不把塑料都做成蓝色的？”因为实验表明这种颜色对海龟来说最不受欢迎。

But other studies have shown that for other species the opposite is true.

不过又有其他的研究表明别的物种又喜欢蓝色。

So if there is no 'one size fits all’ solution, no aspect of plastic that we can easily change to prevent animals from eating it, then what can we take from our foray into the minds of plastic-eaters?

而从大小来看，没有哪一种尺寸我们可以做出之后就防止动物们吃掉它，那么我们能从我们的角度对那些吃塑料的动物们做些什么呢？

Savoca hopes that tragic stories like Attenborough’s albatross will help to turn the consumer tide against disposable plastics and encourage people to empathise with these animals.

萨沃卡希望类似于阿滕伯勒的信天翁这样的悲剧故事能改变人们对一次性塑料的消费潮流，唤起人们对这些动物的同情心。

Ultimately this will help to cut off the supply of junk food pouring into the oceans.

最终这样就可以减少流入海洋的垃圾食品的源头。

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