音频科普:有些乌鸦会“勾引”已故的同类
发布时间:2021-06-24
浏览次数:1724
音频科普:有些乌鸦会“勾引”已故的同类


 Some Crows Hit On Dead Companions有些乌鸦会“勾引”已故的同类
 
About 5 percent of crows will attempt to copulate with other crows that have joined the choir invisible.
有大约百分之五的乌鸦会试图与已经上了“天堂唱诗班”的同类交配。
 
撰文/播音 贾森•G•戈德曼(Jason G. Goldman
翻译 许楠
审校 张艺箫
Crows react really strongly to one of their own being dead—including gathering around their deceased comrades. Some experts believe that these so-called crow funerals are efforts to learn. Perhaps so they can avoid the same fate.  
乌鸦对同类死亡的反应非常强烈——包括聚集在已故的同伴周围。一些专家认为,这些所谓的乌鸦葬礼其实是它们在进行学习如何避免同样的命运。
University of Washington researcher Kaeli Swift is one of those crow experts. When a film crew came to her campus to record these behaviors, Swift and her colleagues placed a dead crow on the grass. And they waited for the crows to show up and investigate. Just as they had done hundreds of previous times.
华盛顿大学的研究员凯利·斯威夫特(Kaeli Swift)是一名乌鸦专家。当一个电影摄制人员来到其学校记录乌鸦的行为时,斯威夫特团队在草地上放了一只死乌鸦,等待乌鸦出现,并进行研究。就像之前做过的几百次实验一样。
"The first bird came in, like they do, and I'm bracing myself for what I'm expecting to be the typical response. Which is that it alights in a tree, and it alarm calls, and then other birds come in…but instead what it does is it flies down to the ground, and it kind of walks up to the crow…but then it goes into really typical crow precopulatory posturing. Where basically they drop their wings down, and they stick their tails up, and they strut. And it just struts on over to the dead crow and jumps on top and copulates with it."
“第一只乌鸦飞了进来,就像它们一样,我也为将要见到意料之中的典型反应而激动。当在树上发现地上的乌鸦后,它会发出警报,然后其他的乌鸦也会飞进来……它会飞到地面上,然后走到乌鸦那里……然后,它会变成典型的交配前的姿势——把翅膀垂下来,尾巴翘起来,昂首阔步。它这样走到死去的乌鸦身边,跳上它的头顶,和它交配。”
Neither Swift nor her advisor had ever heard of this behavior. So they decided to determine just how common it is by conducting a series of experiments with wild crows in Seattle. They saw that most crows don't touch their dead—they observed physical contact roughly a quarter of the time. And sexual contact occurred less than five percent of the time. The finding is in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. [Kaeli Swift & John M. Marzluff. Occurrence and variability of tactile interactions between wild American crows and dead conspecifics]
斯威夫特和她的导师都没有听说过这种行为。所以,他们决定在西雅图对野生乌鸦进行一些的实验,来确定这种现象的普遍性。他们发现,大多数乌鸦不会触碰同伴的尸体——只有大约有四分之一的时间,他们会观察到它们有身体的接触。性接触发生的几率不到5%。这一发现发表在《英国皇家学会哲学学报B》(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)杂志上[Kaeli Swift & John M. Marzluff. Occurrence and variability of tactile interactions between wild American crows and dead conspecifics]
There's a twist that may be instructive: the crows' sexual behaviors were often combined with aggressive ones—not something that usually happens during mating encounters. And this was most frequent early in the breeding season. The researchers therefore wonder if some extremely hormonal crows may be unable to suppress one set of behaviors while expressing the other.
有一种可以解释这一现象的联系:乌鸦的性行为,通常与攻击性行为结合在一起——但在交配时不常见。这一现象在繁殖季节的早期是最常见的。因此,研究员们想知道,是否有一些激素水平超高的乌鸦,在表达一种行为时,可能无法抑制另一种行为。
"Maybe these birds, because of these hormonal influences, are so incredibly territorial, they're so quick to take advantage of any opportunity for an extra-pair copulation, which is something we know crows engage in…but the part about this that makes it so exciting is we were actually able to quantify how frequent this behavior is. And that's completely brand new to science in any vertebrate animal."
“也许这些乌鸦受激素的影响,领域意识异乎寻常的高,它们会快速的把握任何一个交配的机会,于是就出现了我们观察到的事……而最令人兴奋的是我们可以算出这种行为的频率。对于任何脊椎动物研究来说,这都是全新的发现。
原文链接:https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/some-crows-hit-on-dead-companions/



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