科学美国人(翻译)：濒临灭绝的淡水乌龟正在吃塑料 2021.4.1

“So what happened is: I started cutting open these specimens that had been preserved and sitting in the museum collection for five or six years. I took a Dremel tool, cut off the shell, opened it up, looked at the stomach contents. And I was shocked to find that in the 10 animals that I looked, two of those 10 animals had plastics in their stomachs.”

“所以发生了什么事：我开始切开这些被保存下来的标本，并在博物馆收藏中放置了五到六年。我拿了一个德雷梅尔的工具，切掉贝壳，打开它，看着肚子里的东西。我很震惊地发现，在我看过的10只动物中，这10只动物中有2只的肚子里有塑料。”

Greg Pauly’s original plan was to compare the diets of western pond turtles, native to the creeks of the U.C. Davis Arboretum, with those of red-eared sliders that have been introduced. But that all changed when the herpetologist, from the Urban Nature Research Center at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County began to look inside the sliders.

格雷格·保利（Greg Pauly）的最初计划是将原产于加州大学戴维斯分校戴维斯分校小溪的西部池塘龟的饮食与已引入的红耳滑鼠的饮食进行比较。但是，当洛杉矶县自然历史博物馆城市自然研究中心的爬虫学家开始在滑块内部查看时，一切都改变了。

“And suddenly I thought, ‘Oh man, there’s a much bigger story here,’ which is that they’re ingesting plastics, and we know almost nothing about plastic ingestion in freshwater turtles. We know it’s a huge issue in marine turtles, but no one’s looking at this in freshwater turtles.”

Plastic ingestion has been reported over and over again in each of the world’s seven types of sea turtles.

“突然之间，我想，'哦，伙计，这里有一个更大的故事，'那是因为他们正在摄入塑料，而我们对淡水龟的塑料摄入几乎一无所知。我们知道在海龟中这是一个巨大的问题，但没人会在淡水龟中看到这一点。”

据报道，世界上七种海龟中的每一种都反复摄入塑料。

But there’s another 352 types of turtles, and only five studies have ever concerned themselves with plastic ingestion in those species. That'’ despite the fact that more than half of all turtle species are considered threatened with extinction. Turtles are among the most imperiled groups of animals on Earth.

但是，还有另外352种海龟类型，只有五项研究曾涉及到这些物种中的塑料摄食。尽管所有龟类中超过一半被认为濒临灭绝，但事实并非如此。乌龟是地球上最受威胁的动物之一。

“Freshwater turtles around the world are declining. So researchers aren’t going out and euthanizing turtles and putting them into museum collections on a regular basis. We do that for lots of other species, but people aren’t going to be doing that for turtles because it’s just not the right thing to do from a conservation perspective.”

“全世界的淡水海龟正在减少。因此研究人员不会对海龟进行安乐死并定期将它们放入博物馆收藏中。我们对许多其他物种都这样做，但人们不会对海龟这样做，因为从保护的角度来看这不是正确的选择。”

Red-eared sliders are native to the southern U.S. and northern Mexico, but because they’re so popular in the pet trade, they’ve become invasive on every continent except for Antarctica.

红耳滑子原产于美国南部和墨西哥北部，但是由于它们在宠物贸易中非常受欢迎，因此它们已经遍及除南极洲以外的所有大陆。

As conservationists remove red-eared sliders from natural ecosystems, researchers like Pauly can study them as proxies for native species. By seeing how much plastic the red-eared sliders from the U.C. Davis Arboretum are swallowing, he can get an idea for how much plastic the native western pond turtles may be ingesting as well.

当保护主义者从自然生态系统中移除红耳滑子时，像Pauly这样的研究人员就可以将其作为本地物种的代理进行研究。通过查看加州大学戴维斯分校植物园的红耳滑子吞咽了多少塑料，他可以了解当地的西塘龟也可能吸收多少塑料。

The researchers found bits of plastic in five of 65 turtles, or 8 percent. They used a technique called Raman spectroscopy to confirm that it really was plastic and not, say, bits of crayfish exoskeletons.

“That’s what allowed us to determine that one of the plastics was a nitrile glove.”

研究人员在65只海龟中的5只中发现了塑料碎片，占8％。他们使用一种称为拉曼光谱的技术来确认它确实是可塑的，而不是小龙虾的外骨骼。

“这就是让我们确定其中一种塑料是丁腈手套的原因。”

They also identified bits of plastic shopping bags and chunks of plastic cutlery. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports. [Adam G. Clause et al., Plastic ingestion by freshwater turtles: a review and call to action]

“There’s not this awareness that freshwater turtles have this potential threat of plastic ingestion. One of the big goals that we have with our paper is just trying to get increased awareness that plastic ingestion is potentially a big issue for freshwater turtles. If a researcher comes across a dead turtle or a veterinarian is presented with a dead turtle, it’s an opportunity to examine those animals to see whether plastic ingestion is much more common.”

他们还确定了一些塑料购物袋和大块塑料餐具。研究结果发表在《科学报告》杂志上。[Adam G. Clause等人，《淡水龟的塑料摄入：回顾和行动呼吁》。

“没有意识到淡水龟具有这种潜在的塑料摄入威胁。我们论文的主要目标之一就是试图提高人们的认识，塑料摄入对于淡水龟来说可能是个大问题。如果研究人员遇到一只死了的乌龟，或者向兽医展示了一只死了的乌龟，那么这是检查这些动物以了解塑料摄入是否更为普遍的机会。”

If there’s good news, it’s that none of the turtles that Pauly’s team examined seemed to have suffered from swallowing the litter. They all appeared to be in good health.

如果有个好消息，那是保利团队研究的所有乌龟似乎都没有因吞食垃圾而遭受痛苦。他们似乎都身体健康。

“We’re not here saying this is the newest, most horrible threat to freshwater turtles. It’s probably still the case that loss of habitat, introduced predators, overexploitation, those are the big threats to freshwater turtles. But it might very well be that ingestion of plastics and other litter is a big threat for some species and for some populations. We don’t know. But given that turtles are really having a rough go of it right now, this is the most threatened group of vertebrates. Sixty-one percent of all turtle species are threatened or have gone extinct. It’s a rough time to be a turtle on this planet.”

“我们不是在这里说这是对淡水龟的最新，最可怕的威胁。栖息地的丧失，掠食者的引入，过度开发，这些仍然是对淡水龟的巨大威胁。但是，很可能塑料和其他垃圾的摄入对某些物种和某些种群构成巨大威胁。我们不知道 但是考虑到海龟现在真的过得很艰难，这是最受威胁的脊椎动物群体。所有龟类中有61％受到威胁或已灭绝。在这个星球上成为乌龟是艰难的时刻。”

Pauly and his colleagues call on biologists to devote some of their attention to this understudied topic. And regular people can do their part as well, especially with all the single-use PPE we’ve all been wearing throughout the pandemic—like the nitrile glove pieces Pauly found inside one of the turtles.

保利和他的同事呼吁生物学家将一些注意力投入到这个未被充分研究的话题上。而且普通人也可以发挥作用，尤其是在整个大流行期间，我们都穿着所有一次性使用的PPE，例如Pauly在其中一只乌龟中发现的丁腈手套。

“It’s really easy to do: limit the amount of single-use plastics that you yourself are even purchasing. Try to make sure that those plastics that you do purchase end up getting reused or recycled and certainly make sure that those plastics don’t end up in the environment.”

“这确实很容易：限制您自己甚至购买的一次性塑料的数量。尝试确保您购买的那些塑料最终会被再利用或回收，当然还要确保这些塑料不会在环境中使用。”