让你不可思议，鲑鱼的性行为居然能改变地理形貌？

鲑鱼的性行为居然能够改变河流及周边环境的地貌，如果你不吃鲑鱼，你能想象你周边的环境会有什么变化么？ [www.enbus.cn 免费英语学习网站]

Sex. It drives people to do crazy things. Animals too. They’ll make unsettling sounds, perform complex dances, or show off giant plumes of colorful feathers. And, famously, salmon will swim hundreds of kilometers upstream to get down to business. They also inadvertently rework the landscape.

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性欲望或者性行为总会让人们做些疯狂的事情。动物也不例外，在有需求时，它们会发出让人心绪不宁的声音、表演舞蹈、抑或是骚首弄姿炫耀绚丽的羽毛。但是最出名的是鲑鱼会向上游游数百千米来办事。不经意地，它们的行为也改变了自然的景观。 [www.enbus.cn 免费英语学习网站]

“Adult salmon spend most of their life out in the ocean and then they come in to freshwater to mate.” Washington State University ecologist Alex Fremier.

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“成年鲑鱼一生中多数的时间在海里，但是当它们交配时要去淡水区。” 华盛顿大学的生态学家Alex Fremier说。 [www.enbus.cn 免费英语学习网站]

“What the female salmon will do is, she digs a hole in the streambed.” [www.enbus.cn 免费英语学习网站]

而雌性鲑鱼所需要做的就是在河床上挖一个洞。

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That little hole is called a redd. That’s where the salmon lays her eggs. And Fremier says when she builds it, she basically “unpacks” the stream bed, making all those loose sands and gravels more mobile. High water and flooding events move that sediment, which in turn exposes bedrock to further erosion. [www.enbus.cn 免费英语学习网站]

挖的这个小洞叫做“redd”。这也是鲑鱼产卵的地方。Fremier表示，当雌性鲑鱼建造好这个洞以后，她基本上就算将这个洞“打包”了。这个洞会让松软沙子和碎石更易流动，因此在涨潮期以及汛期会使砂石等沉积物移动，另一方面这么做也增加了基岩的腐蚀程度。

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“It’s quite impressive. We did not expect to have salmon, in some cases, changing the vertical position of a river channel up to 30 percent more than it would have without salmon in it.”

“这确实让人印象深刻。与没有鲑鱼的河道相比，我们没有想过鲑鱼会将河道的垂直距离改变30%多。”

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Fremier hypothesized that salmon not only influence landscape evolution, but that the evolution of salmon as a species itself has a landscape-level impact. To test the idea, he and colleagues recreated salmon redds in an experimental flume. Then they compared findings from the flume with real field observations. They cross-referenced all that data with discoveries from a study that modelled river profile erosion over five million years. [http://bbs.enbus.cn 英语论坛]

Fremier假设道鲑鱼不仅可以影响景观演化，同时鲑鱼这种物种自身的进化也会影响自然景观。为了验证想法的正确性，Fremier和同事们在实验的水槽中制造了鲑鱼的“redd”。之后，他们将研究结果与实地中的观察结果进行了比较。并将发现的所有数据和之前模拟的五百万年前的河流横断面的研究进行了对照。

“We were stunned by the fact that it actually had a larger scale effect, given that we account for tectonic uplift, the big floods, like a lot of flood water moving downstream, different conditions of the gravel sizes on the river. I think we were all surprised by the fact that salmon could have such a large effect at that million-year scale.”

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“随后我们被这样一个事实惊呆了，因为它实际上有一个更大的规模效应。因为我们还考虑到构造隆起、洪水等因素，如大量洪水向下游移动、河流里不同尺寸条件下的沙小。我想我们都对鲑鱼能在这么多的时间里有如此巨大的影响感到惊讶。” [http://bbs.enbus.cn 英语论坛]

The study is in the journal Geomorphology.

该研究结果发表在《地形学》杂志上。 [www.enbus.cn 免费英语学习网站]

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