英文原文

Will Killing Whales Save the World's Fisheries?

Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, whale meat does not taste good. I know from experience: as a reporter in Tokyo I once attended a whale food festival — there were whale noodles, whale sashimi, fried whale, whale on crackers — put on by Japanese whaling industry lobbyists for the country's legislators. But 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. While industry supporters contend that it's necessary for food security, today the average Japanese eats a little more than an ounce of whale meat per year, which puts a damper on the argument.

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 to fast-disappearing fish stocks. Whales, after all, eat a lot of seafood, so it would make sense that controlling whale populations would be smart "ecosystem management," as whaling supporters put it. But a new article in the Feb. 13 issue of Science demonstrates that's hardly the case. "Essentially what we found was that...if you remove whales, it has a negligible impact on the biomass that is commercially available for fishing," says Leah Gerber, a conservation biologist at Arizona State University and the article's lead author. Translation: killing whales won't resuscitate depleted fisheries.

The reason is that marine ecosystems and food webs are far more complicated than the one-to-one predator-and-prey relationship we might expect. Analyzing the waters off Western Africa and the Caribbean, where baleen whales breed, Gerber and her colleagues mined marine data to create ecosystem models that plotted the feeding interactions between whales and fish. (They chose these waters in part because Japan is using the fishery argument to persuade Caribbean and African nations to support the lifting of the whaling ban.)

The models allowed the scientists to test what would happen if whale populations declined. It turned out that whale numbers had little impact on commercial fish populations, in part because the kind of sea life whales like to eat — krill, plankton — is highly unlikely to end up on your dinner plate. "The seafood that people prefer is higher on the food web than [whales' diet]," says Gerber. There's also the undeniable fact that today's whale populations are still just a fraction of what they were in the days when Captain Ahab was (unsuccessfully) whaling, yet commercial fish populations are still dwindling.

The International Whaling Commission is set to meet in a few months, and Japan and its allies will once again push for an end to the commercial ban — an appeal the Science analysis significantly undermines. But one fact of the Japanese argument is undeniable: the world's commercial fisheries are in serious trouble, and they're getting worse. In new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 12, the marine ecologist William Cheung announced that climate change would have a devastating impact on the world's commercial fish and shellfish populations, including tuna, herring and prawns. Fish would flee toward the poles to escape rising temperatures, and many species would all but disappear from their familiar habitats. Many would not survive the transition — Cheung estimated that the Atlantic cod's distribution could drop by up to 50% by 2050 thanks to climate change. "The scary thing is that this isn't just happening in the future," he says. "We're seeing similar things happening now."

Preserving commercial fisheries isn't as simple as culling whales — it isn't simple at all. But if the world's fishing nations fail to curb overfishing and protect endangered marine habitats, in the end, whale might be all we have left to eat — and trust me, you won't like it.

参考翻译

捕鲸能挽救世界渔业么？

尽管你没有听说过任何相反的说法，但鲸鱼肉的确不好吃。我是从经验中得知的：作为东京的一名记者，我曾出席了一个鲸鱼美食节：在那里，有鲸鱼面、生的鲸鱼片、炸鲸鱼、带有鲸鱼肉的饼干等等，这些都是日本捕鲸业的游说者为该国的立法者准备的。但是或许是因为被禁止而带有神秘性，鲸鱼肉吃起来极其乏味，属于那种没有其他可食用的东西的时候才会吃的食物。
　　
　　那么究竟是为什么，使鲸鱼肉成为日本人食物中不可或缺的一部分呢？在二战后的那些贫困的日子里，鲸鱼肉曾作为廉价的蛋白质来源，但随着国家变得富裕起来，鲸鱼肉不像从前那样受欢迎了。尽管如此，日本（包括挪威和冰岛）仍然在继续狩猎和捕杀鲸鱼。从2006年到2007年间有超过800头鲸鱼被捕杀，直接导致了全球商业捕鲸禁令的终结。然而行业支持者认为对于粮食安全来说，这是十分必要的，而今，平均每个日本人每年要吃一盎司多的鲸肉，这给争论带来了不愉快的气氛。
　　
　　所以，近年来，捕鲸业一直采取不同的防御措施--鲸鱼数量必须得到控制，通过宰杀来减少他们对迅速消失的鱼类种群的威胁。鲸鱼，毕竟是吃了很多海鲜，所以控制鲸类数量在某种意义上就相当于进行“生态系统管理”，就像捕鲸支持者们说的那样。但是，2月13日的发行的《科学》杂志中有一篇新的论文，其表明了事实并非捕鲸支持者们所说的那样。该文章的主要作者，在亚利桑那州立大学的生物保护学家莉娅迪.葛柏尔称“我们发现，在本质上.......如果你将鲸鱼捕杀殆尽，可供商业捕鱼的生物数量也不会有明显改观。”换句话说，捕杀鲸鱼不会令枯竭的渔业重现生机。
　　
　　原因就是海洋生态系统和食物网远比我们多期望的捕食者与猎物一对一的关系复杂得多，葛柏尔和她的同事分析了非洲西部海域和加勒比地区的须鲸繁殖地，并且依据采集的数据建立了海洋生态系统模型，并且绘制了鲸鱼和其他鱼类之间的食物链。（他们选择这些水域，某种程度上是因为日本是使用渔业论点，试图说服加勒比和非洲国家支持解除捕鲸禁令。）
　　
　　该模型允许科学家们测试，如果鲸类种群下降将带来什么，其结果是鲸类的数量对于商业鱼类的数量影响很小，部分上是因为鲸类所爱吃的海洋生物种类是磷虾和浮游生物，而这些生物不可能出现在人们的餐桌上，葛柏尔说，“人类所喜爱的海洋生物在食物网中的位置远比鲸鱼的高。另外还有一个不可否认的事实，今天的鲸鱼数量仅仅是亚哈船长时代（当时还不能成功地捕获鲸鱼）的一部分，然而商业鱼类种群数仍在减少。
　　
　　国际捕鲸委员会成员将在未来几个月内会面，届时日本及其盟国又会提议结束商业捕鲸的禁令，这也大大违背了科学的分析。但是日方的争论所不能否认的是，世界上的商业捕鱼业正面临着严重的问题，甚至变得更糟。在2月12日美国科学发展协会的年度会议上，提出了一项新的研究成果。海洋生态学家威廉.车昂表示，气候变化将对世界上商业鱼类和贝类的数量造成灾难性影响，包括金枪鱼，鲱鱼和大虾。鱼类会因逃避温度上升而游走向两极，许多物种都将从其熟悉的栖息地消失--许多人将因温度的转变而无法生存。他估计，由于气候变化的影响，到2050年，大西洋鳕鱼的分布可能下降到50％。“ 这些可怕的事情不仅是发生在未来， ”他说。 “我们现在已经看到类似的事情发生了。 ”
　　
　　维护商业渔业并不是宰杀鲸鱼这么简单--事实上它并不简单。但是，如果世界上捕鱼国未能遏制过度捕捞并且保护濒危海洋生物的栖息地，到最后，鲸可能是我们所剩的唯一可以吃的---而且相信我，你不会喜欢它。