一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day9 passage3

Passage 3 Will Killing Whales Save the World’s Fisheries?
捕鲸能挽救世界渔业吗？ 《时代周刊》

For all its forbidden mystique,
whale meat tastes spectacularly bland the sort of food you might eat only
if there were nothing else available.
And that happens to be exactly why whale became a significant part of
the Japanese diet, as a cheap source of protein in the impoverished days
following World War II. As the country grew wealthier, however,
whale meat grew less popular.
Still, Japan (along with Norway and Iceland) continues to hunt and kill whales
more than 800 in the 2006 to 2007 season and is pushing for
an end to the 22-year-old worldwide ban on commercial whaling.
So in recent years the whaling industry has been trying out a different defense
that whale populations need to be culled to reduce their threat
[01:02]to fast-disappearing fish stocks. Whales, after all, eat a lot of seafood,
[01:09]so it would make sense that controlling whale populations would be smart
[01:14]"ecosystem management," as whaling supporters put it.
[01:19]But a new article in the Feb. 13 issue of Science demonstrates
[01:25]that's hardly the case. "Essentially what we found was that...
[01:30]if you remove the whales, it has a negligible impact on the biomass
[01:35]that is commercially available for fishing," says Leah Gerber,
[01:39]a conservation biologist at Arizona State University
[01:43]and the article's lead author.
[01:46]Translation: killing whales won't resuscitate depleted fisheries.
[01:52]The reason is that marine ecosystems and food webs
[01:57]are far more complicated than the one-to-one predator-and-prey relationship
[02:04]we might expect. Analyzing the waters off Western Africa and the Caribbean,
[02:11]where baleen whales breed, Gerber
[02:14]and her colleagues mined marine data to create ecosystem models
[02:19]that plotted the feeding interactions between whales and fish.
[02:24]The models allowed the scientists to test what would happen
[02:29]if whale populations declined. It turned out
[02:33]that whale numbers had little impact on commercial fish populations,
[02:38]in part because the kind of sea life whales like to eat - krill,
[02:44]plankton is highly unlikely to end up on your dinner plate.
[02:50]The International Whaling Commission is set to meet in a few months,
[02:55]and Japan and its allies will once again push for an end to
[02:59]the commercial ban an appeal the Science analysis significantly undermines.
[03:06]But one fact of the Japanese argument is undeniable:
[03:11]the world's commercial fisheries are in serious trouble,
[03:15]and they're getting worse. In new research presented at the annual meeting
[03:21]of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 12,
[03:28]the marine ecologist William Cheung announced that climate change
[03:33]would have a devastating impact on the world's commercial fish
[03:38]and shellfish populations, including tuna, herring and prawns.
[03:45]Fish would flee toward the poles to escape rising temperatures,
[03:50]and many species would all but disappear from their familiar habitats.
[03:57]Many would not survive the transition Cheung estimated
[04:02]that the Atlantic cod's distribution could drop by up to 50% by 2050
[04:09]thanks to climate change.
[04:12]"The scary thing is that this isn't just happening in the future,"
[04:16]he says. "We're seeing similar things happening now."