外刊阅读20240926｜如果大海里有六车道

+

上期划线句答案

+

本期内容

◆

双语阅读

The ocean feels infinite. If you were to start swimming from shore, it’s easy to believe—fitness and oxygen aside—that you could continue forever. That’s a much different experience from overland travel, where mountains, rivers, and six-lane highways buzzing with traffic thwart easy passage.

It’s equally easy to believe that fish and other highly mobile marine creatures experience the ocean in an unrestrained fashion. Surely these animals, adapted over millennia to navigate the ocean, must easily bypass any barrier around which they can theoretically swim. That assumption, though, is wrong.

According to Karissa Lear, an aquatic ecologist at Australia’s Murdoch University, it’s common for many marine species to stick to specific habitats and only seldom venture beyond them. That is especially true for many juvenile animals, she says, which are small and vulnerable to predation. This timidness can cause unexpectedly big problems for marine species, especially when infrastructure gets in the way.

In 2017, engineers working on a local oil-and-gas-processing plant built a new loading facility consisting of a large piling jetty and solid rock wall, which stretched about 550 yards offshore . At the time, Lear and her colleagues were concerned with how the construction would affect the critically endangered green sawfish, which uses the region as a nursery.