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听力文本
This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.
Charles Darwin is most famous for his finches, from whose beaks he gleaned the idea that a single species might radiate into many.
But he studied other attributes of birds, too—like the rhythmic sounds some species made during courtship by fluttering, shaking or rattling their feathers together.
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"Since Darwin, there's been this fact that birds produce sounds with wings and tails or flight feathers. So there's species of manakins that do this sound; there's hummingbirds that do this sound."
Valentina Gómez-Bahamón is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.
She and her team have now observed that nonvocal-sound-production phenomenon in another type of bird: the fork-tailed flycatcher. The researchers studied two groups of the birds in South America—and recorded the birds making these fluttering sounds with their wings during morning courtship rituals...
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... and in combat between males.
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One of the two flycatcher subspecies is migratory. The other stays put. And by carefully measuring the birds' feathers, the research team found that the migratory birds had longer, thinner feathers—presumably for some aerodynamic advantage. But that altered feather shape also meant the birds' fluttering produced a different frequency.
Compare the migratory birds' flutter...
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... to the stationary birds'.
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"So basically what we think is that because of loss of migration, pressures for flight may influence the shape of the individual feathers to the point where the sound quality changes as well."
The details are in the journal Integrative & Comparative Biology.
Gómez-Bahamón says they're still not certain what role the sounds play in day-to-day flycatcher life—if the birds do indeed even pay attention to them. But she suspects the sounds may have some cultural importance to the birds.
In which case, she says, the communication differences between the migratory and nonmigratory birds could further divide the two types of birds—or in other words, give rise to the origin of species.
Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
参考译文
这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。
查尔斯·达尔文最著名的是他的雀鸟，他从雀鸟喙中获得了一个想法，即一个物种可能辐射多个物种。
但他也研究了鸟类的其他特性，比如某些物种会在求偶过程中通过让羽毛一起拍动、抖动或发出声响来产生有节奏的声音。
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“自达尔文以来，鸟类通过翅膀、尾巴或飞羽发出声音这一事实就一直存在。侏儒鸟会这样发出声音；有些蜂鸟也会通过这种方式发出声音。”
芝加哥菲尔德博物馆的进化生物学家和鸟类学家瓦伦蒂娜·戈麦斯·巴汉姆说到。
她和团队现已观察到另一种有非嗓音发声现象的鸟类：叉尾王霸鶲。研究人员对南美洲的两组鸟进行了研究，并记录了这些鸟在早上求偶仪式中用翅膀发出的拍打声……
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……以及雄鸟打架时发出的声音。
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两种王霸鶲亚种中，一种是迁徙性的。另一种则待在原地。通过仔细测量鸟的羽毛，研究团队发现迁徙鸟的羽毛更长、更薄，这可能是由于某种空气动力学优势。但羽毛形状的改变也意味着鸟儿拍打翅膀产生了不同的频率。
将迁徙鸟的拍打
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……与静止鸟的拍打进行对比。
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“因此，基本上我们认为，由于缺少迁徙，飞行压力可能会影响个别羽毛的形状，以至于音质也发生了变化。”
研究详细内容发表在《综合与比较生物学》期刊上。
戈麦斯·巴汉姆表示，他们仍不确定这些声音在王霸鶲日常生活中扮演什么角色——如果它们真的注意到这些声音的话。但她怀疑这些声音可能对鸟类有一定的文化意义。
她表示，在这种情况下，迁徙和非迁徙鸟之间的交流差异可能进一步分化这两种鸟，或者换句话说，引发物种起源。
谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
重点讲解
重点讲解：
1. be famous for 著名的；有名的；
The band were famous for their preposterous clothes and haircuts.
这支乐队以怪异的服装和发式而闻名。
2. stay put 固定不动；留在原地；
These people could afford to retire to Florida but they'd just as soon stay put.
这些人有足够的钱可以去佛罗里达安度退休生活，可是他们却宁愿留在原来的地方。
3. pay attention to 关心；注意；
More than ever before, the food industry is paying attention to young consumers.
食品工业比以往任何时候都更加关注年轻消费者。
4. give rise to 引起；使发生；
Low levels of choline in the body can give rise to high blood-pressure.
体内胆碱水平过低会引起高血压。
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