Researchers tested the hearing of beluga whales in an Alaskan bay and found that they seem to have suffered little hearing loss due to ocean noise. Christopher Intagliata reports.

研究人员给阿拉斯加海湾的白鲸进行了听力测试，发现他们的听力可能并没有受到海洋噪音的影响。

撰文/播音 克里斯多佛·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）

翻译 许楠

审校 张艺箫

Credit: ©Royalty-Free/CORBIS

Beluga whales rely on a sharp sense of hearing to communicate, to navigate and to feed. But the ocean is a noisy place. There's commercial shipping, navy sonar, oil and gas extraction, pile driving, underwater explosions.

白鲸依靠敏锐的听觉来进行交流、航行和捕食。（白鲸叫声）但是海洋是一个很嘈杂的环境，有商业船、海军声纳、石油天然气抽取机、打桩机和水下爆破的声音。

One way to tell if all that noise is affecting belugas: capture them for a routine physical. "So it's kind of like going to the doctor's office for them, but they're also kind of abducted by aliens at the same time."

有一个可以得知白鲸是否受到这些噪音的影响的方法是：抓他们去做身体检查。“这就类似于将它们带到了医生的诊室，但是对它们来说，也像是被外星人绑架了一样。”

Aran Mooney, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He and his team captured 26 belugas in Alaska's Bristol Bay for a battery of checkups, including a hearing test.

树洞海洋学协会（Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution）的海洋生物学家阿兰·穆尼（Aran Mooney）和他的团队在阿拉斯加州的布里斯托湾抓捕了26只白鲸，并对它们进行了包括听力测试在内的一系列检查。

"We can play a very controlled, designed sound to the animal, a hearing test tone." Then they measured the beluga's brain response using an electrode on the animal's head.

“我们在听力测试时，能够为它们播放受到精准控制和设计的声音。”（听力测试音）然后利用电极来检测白鲸大脑对声音的反应。

The diagnosis? "They're doing fantastic—and they're better than what we thought they were going to be." And older belugas seemed to have less age-related hearing loss than aging dolphins screened in previous studies. The full bill of health is in the Journal of Experimental Biology [T. Aran Mooney et al., Variation in hearing within a wild population of beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas)].

至于诊断结果呢？“它们做的很好——比我们预想的要好。”老年白鲸的听力与前人研究的老年海豚的听力比起来，由于年龄增长而损失的听力要更少一些。完整的检查资料被收录于实验生物学杂志（Journal of Experimental Biology）[T. Aran Mooney et al., Variation in hearing within a wild population of beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas)]。

These belugas live in a relatively pristine environment, which might explain why they aced the hearing test. Animals in noisier waters might not fare so well, Mooney says. And the same might go for belugas as the volume slowly rises in the underwater Arctic.

这些白鲸生活在相对原始的环境中，这或许可以解释为什么它们在听力测试中能够表现得如此优秀。动物们在嘈杂的水环境中往往不会发育的很好，穆尼说。或许白鲸也是如此，因为它们的数量在北极水域中增长的很缓慢。