原文已被隐藏，你可用 快捷键 - 或点击 显示原文 按钮来查看原文
第1段
1 .This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?
该句暂无译文！
2 .Warmer, more acidic oceans are already damaging corals in the South Pacific.
该句暂无译文！
3 .But the corals also have more visible foes: such as crown-of-thorns sea stars.
该句暂无译文！
4 ."It's an underwater swarm of locusts with a stomach that can be turned wrong side out and digest you as it walks across."
该句暂无译文！
5 .Mark Hay, a marine ecologist at Georgia Tech.
该句暂无译文！
6 ."You just look in front of them and there's good corals, and you look behind them and there's these white skeletons."
该句暂无译文！
7 .Hay says the corals in Fiji's marine protected areas are particularly vulnerable to attack.
该句暂无译文！
8 .So he and his colleague Cody Clements took a closer look at the underwater ecosystem there.
该句暂无译文！
9 .And they discovered something weird.
该句暂无译文！
10 .Neighboring seaweeds usually compete for resources with corals to the point where they will whip corals with their fronds and poison them with toxins.
该句暂无译文！
11 .But the researchers found that, in this case, the seaweeds were saving the corals, blocking the marauding sea stars.
该句暂无译文！
12 ."And so these competitors were really acting as kind of bodyguards for the corals, once things got bad."
该句暂无译文！
13 .Hay and Clements replicated those observations in underwater experiments, in which even fake seaweed did the trick, suggesting that seaweed is simply passively blocking the predators.
该句暂无译文！
14 .The findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
该句暂无译文！
15 .The marine reserves in Fiji are relatively small.
该句暂无译文！
16 .And they border lots of degraded reefs, which Hay suspects are playgrounds for baby sea stars.
该句暂无译文！
17 .When the stars get older and hungrier, he says, pristine corals are right next door.
该句暂无译文！
18 ."They kind of act like little piles of candy that you put out in the kindergarten.
该句暂无译文！
19 .Everybody just recruits to them, and eats them quickly."
该句暂无译文！
20 .The reserves don't have much seaweed, either, so the coral lack their bodyguards, except for an interested human:
该句暂无译文！
21 ."In one of the villages there's a guy that's particularly supportive of the marine protected area named Aquila.
该句暂无译文！
22 .And he has sort of a floating wheelbarrow, and he goes out every now and then and fills it up with crown-of-thorns starfish and he comes back and builds a fire and burns them, on the shore, to keep them from regenerating."
该句暂无译文！
23 .This study suggests Aquila's system of killing the starfish to save the coral is on the right track.
该句暂无译文！
24 .And Hay says his aggressive management style might be worth emulating elsewhere in Fiji: to ensure that marine protected areas still have something to protect in years to come.
该句暂无译文！
25 .Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
该句暂无译文！