造礁珊瑚显示出与上次大灭绝事件相似的“灾难特征”

Stony corals — which help to shelter a large number of ocean-dwelling species — are preparing for a major extinction event, a new study reveals.

一项新的研究显示，作为众多海洋生物的避难所的石珊瑚，正准备应对一场重大的灭绝事件。

The researchers, who published their study Tuesday in Scientific Reports, discovered that corals are exhibiting a number of survival responses that appear to mirror their last big extinction some 66 million years ago.

研究人员周二在《科学报告》(Scientific Reports)杂志上发表了他们的研究结果。他们发现，珊瑚正在表现出一系列的生存反应，这些反应似乎反映了它们在大约6600万年前最后一次的大灭绝。

Those coral traits include a higher frequency of deep-water residing, solitary or tiny colonies, bleaching resistance and others.

珊瑚的这些特征包括更高频率的深水居住，独居或小群体，抗漂白和其他。

“It was incredibly spooky to witness how corals are now exhibiting the same traits as they did at the last major extinction event,” said David Gruber, a researcher and marine biologist with the Graduate Center, CUNY and Baruch College, in a statement. “Corals seem to be preparing to jump across an extinction boundary, while we are putting our foot further on the pedal.”

纽约市立大学和巴鲁克学院研究生中心的研究员、海洋生物学家大卫·格鲁伯在一份声明中说:“看到珊瑚现在表现出与上一次大灭绝事件相同的特征，真是令人毛骨悚然。”“珊瑚似乎正准备跨越灭绝的界限，而我们正进一步加大力度。”

The team, which includes an international group of scientists, analyzed 250 million years of fossil coral data from the Paleobiology Database and then compared this to modern data.

这个由国际科学家组成的团队分析了来自古生物学数据库的2.5亿年的珊瑚化石数据，并将其与现代数据进行了比较。

“This study reminds us that corals are diverse and flexible organisms with a demonstrated success facing the most extreme environmental crisis in Earth’s history: mass extinction,” said the study’s first author Gal Dishon, a marine biologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California.

加利福尼亚大学斯克里普斯海洋研究所的海洋生物学家盖尔·迪松是这项研究的第一作者，他说:“这项研究提醒我们，珊瑚是多种多样、灵活多变的生物，它们成功地应对了地球历史上最严重的环境危机:大灭绝。”

“Nevertheless, based on the lessons we learned from fossil data, the surviving corals will not be those reef builders we know from hyper-diverse tropical coral reefs, but rather small, solitary, slow-growing and deep-dwelling corals,” Dishon explained.

迪松解释说:“然而，根据我们从化石数据中得到的教训，幸存的珊瑚不会是那些我们从高度多样化的热带珊瑚礁中了解到的珊瑚礁建造者，而是小型的、独居的、生长缓慢的和深居的珊瑚。”

“There is something very powerful about this message coming from the corals,” said Gruber. “Corals are such a sensitive group of marine creatures, they are essentially the canary in the coal mine.”

格鲁伯说:“珊瑚发出的信息非常有力。珊瑚是一群非常敏感的海洋生物，它们本质上是煤矿里的金丝雀。”