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Sardines Will Abandon You A)

游客2024-03-07  40
问题                                                 Sardines Will Abandon You
    A) It has been an exceptionally good year for whale watching in California. In past seasons, sightseers off Monterey typically spotted two or three humpbacks (座头鲸) on a single afternoon at sea. This past September, October, November, and December, whale watchers was treated to more than 50 at a time. Dozens of killer whales played in the same area throughout the fall. In December, a total of 364 gray whales were counted migrating south past Palos Verdes—double the 182 spotted there in December 2012.
    B) California has witnessed a genuine explosion of sea life over the past six months, and whales aren’t the only ones making waves. Environmental scientists said in December that they were seeing "unprecedented" numbers of brown pelicans (鹈鹕) in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s been "a months-long carnival of humpback whales, bird clouds, dolphin wizardry, frenzied sea lions, playful killer whales and even visits from marine royalty—blue whales," wrote the Santa Cruz Sentinel. To borrow a line from Melville: Surely all this is not without meaning.
    C) And meaning there is in this tale of Pacific ecology and American history. The increased activity of marine megafauna (巨型动物) is being attributed to an anchovy (凤尾鱼) boom: The tiny fish have crowded the coast, densely packed, sparking an ongoing feeding frenzy. The flip side of the great anchovy upwelling, though, is the great sardine crash of 2013, which scientists expect to rebound throughout the ecosystem for decades to come. Cetaceans (鲸目动物) , sea lions, and pelicans in Monterey may be feasting on anchovies now, but they’ll eventually be hurt by sardine scarcity, according to some biologists. An epidemic of sick sea lion pups in Southern California is already being blamed on the decline of sardines.
    D) The last time Pacific sardines declined this steeply was around 1950, shortly after John Steinbeck so exquisitely captured the prime of the sardine canning industry in his novel Cannery Row.
    E) Atlantic editor Corby Kummer described the fishery’s ups and downs, and its significance, in a 2007 article titled "The Rise of the Sardine." In the decades before Steinbeck wrote his novel, the sardine industry was feeding millions of soldiers in both world wars and sustaining thousands of foreign-born workers—the canners and fishermen of Cannery Row—during the Great Depression. But the largest fishery in the Western hemisphere began to mysteriously decline even while it was being immortalized in literature. By the mid-1950s, it had collapsed entirely.
    F) The canneries shut down and Monterey started losing its smell. From 1967 to 1986 there were severe restrictions on sardine fishing, and Cannery Row "turned into Skid Row," in Rummer’s words. Then it went to the tourists: an abandoned cannery was transformed into the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a bronze bust of Steinbeck went up a few blocks away; now "Historic Cannery Row is Monterey’s premiere destination for great hotels, shopping, dining, family fun and nightlife."
    G) The sardines came back after a couple of decades, and the stock climbed steadily into the new millennium—hence Kummer’s argument, in 2007, that sardines were ready for a culinary revival. But now the population has crashed again.
    H) In the 1950s, the collapse of the sardine industry was blamed on overfishing. It’s tempting to blame the current decline on global warming. Neither of those factors deserves single-handed responsibility, though. Oceanographers have known for a little while, now, that there’s a natural ocean cycle—though, a long one that’s not fully understood—that governs the rise and fall of sardine and anchovy stocks in the Pacific.
    I) In 2003, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) combed through decades of data on physical oceanography, marine biology, and meteorology in the Pacific Ocean in search of long-term cycles governing sardine and anchovy populations. They concluded that sardine and anchovy stocks fluctuate according to a roughly 50-year "boom-and-bust" cycle. "A naturally occurring climate pattern that works its way across the Pacific," also known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, brings warmer temperatures to the California coast approximately every 25 years, prompting a switch-off between anchovies and sardines.
    J) In 2013, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego even went deep into this cycle. Using data derived from various models and simulations—including a previous study that reconstructed thousands of years of sardine and anchovy population trends based on sedimentary seafloor deposits—they came up with what they believed to be an accurate reproduction of sardine-anchovy fluctuations from 1661 to 2013. This model "showed that the sardine and anchovy fluctuations were not controlled solely by climate, as had been previously suggested," according to a write-up on Scripps’s Explorations Now site. The Scripps researchers gave more weight to the role of overfishing in sardine stocks than the MBARI researchers did in 2003.
    K) Both studies underscore the complexity of predicting the rise and fall of global fish populations. George Sugihara, another biologist at Scripps, thinks that all simulations fisheries scientists use to predict populations and set quotas are "fundamentally flawed." These models don’t reflect the "dynamic complexity" of the ocean, and can’t account for how a population’s growth rate might vary in response to, for example, overfishing of another species or introductions of invasive species. His point is reinforced by a recent study, published in December 2013 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlighting the "snowball effect" of overfishing and confirming what many have always known about the interconnectedness of different species.
    L) In an excellent piece of reporting for the Monterey County Weekly, David Schmalz interviewed representatives from various ocean conservation and fisheries management organizations about their conflicting opinions regarding the future of sardines. NOAA uses a specific formula to project the sardine population and set catch limits each year—a formula that the non-profit advocacy group Oceana wants to change, arguing that it’s not restrictive enough. Some commercial fishermen in California, of course, think the formula is already too restrictive.
    M) "When people think of sardines they think of Cannery Row, Steinbeck, the Aquarium," wrote Schmalz. "When people think of anchovies, they think of pizza that disgusts them." It may be time to let sardines go, a second time, and come to terms with anchovies, he suggests.
    N) The last time sardines said "see you later" was a bitter goodbye. This time it isn’t, in part because of the lessons we learned when they all but disappeared. One of those lessons is simple: Do not rely on sardines for a paycheck, because they will abandon you.
    O) Another lesson: recovery. That the Monterey area was able to reinvent itself and become a world-class tourist destination in a matter of a decade is an incredible feat. All around the U.S., there are cities in decline that have been abandoned by the industries that supported them. Monterey, years ago, was one of those cities, and the people that stayed on responded like prizefighters, establishing a sustainable industry (tourism) that will carry on for generations.
    P) But the most important lesson their disappearance taught us—and one we are certainly still learning—is respect for the sea, and the balance of its ecosystems. When the fishery began, and truly thrived, there were so many fish in the sea it was hard for anyone to imagine they could be exhausted. [br] A recent study confirmed the interconnectivity of different species, which many have always known about.
选项
答案 K
解析 题干意为，最近一项研究证实了不同生物间的互联性，这一点很多人一直以来就是知道的。根据题干中的关键词the interconnectivity of different species可定位到K段。该段末句提到，他的观点得到了2013年12月《美国国家科学院院刊》一篇新研究的支持，强调了过度捕捞的“滚雪球效应”，并证实了长期以来许多人相信的不同生物间的互联性。由此可知，题干是对原文的同义转述，故选K。
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