評論
打印
Big Animal Extinction Impoverishes Soil
大型動物滅亡貧瘠了土壤
By about 10,000 years ago, nearly 100 species of large animals had been recently driven to extinction around the globe. This march of megafauna mortality coincides suspiciously with the arrival of another large animal in their vicinity: humans.
大約一萬年前，世界范圍內大約有100種左右的大型動物滅絕。與此同時，附近的另一種大型動物，人類到來了。
The die-off in South America included giant ground sloths and armadillo-like animals the size of cars known as glyptodonts. And the deaths seem responsible for the dearth of nutrients in Amazon rainforest soils today. So says a study in the journal Nature Geoscience.
南美洲滅亡的動物包括大型地懶和一種犰狳科動物，足足有汽車大小的雕齒獸。它們的滅亡似乎跟現在亞馬遜雨林土壤的營養流失有關。《自然地理科學》雜志上一片研究這樣表示。
Plainly put, these big animals disperse a lot of phosphorous in their feces. Once the big animals are gone, there's no way for the phosphorous to get from one part of the rainforest to another. As a result, the Amazon rainforest even today is struggling to recover from that loss of fertility.
說白了，這些大型動物排泄物里面有很多磷元素。一旦這些大型動物滅絕了，磷元素就無法在雨林里流通。結果就是就算是今天的亞馬遜雨林也正在從營養流失中恢復。
Other parts of the world face the same poop paucity predicament, according to the researchers’ model. But the impact outside the Amazon was less severe, for reasons still unknown. What is clear is that the impact of extinction reverberates down through the millennia, a clear signal that we’ve been living in the Anthropocene for a while.
研究人員的模型顯示，世界上其他地方也面臨糞便缺乏的困境。但是亞馬遜雨林之外的地區沒那么嚴重，原因未知。現在很清楚的是，經過了數千年之后，這些大型動物滅亡帶來的影響正在減弱，我們已經在人類紀生活了有段時間了。
—David Biello
