When Hurricane Irma blew through the Turks and Caicos, lizards with shorter hindlimbs lucked out. Jason G. Goldman reports. 

飓风伊玛吹过特克斯和凯科斯群岛时，后肢较短的蜥蜴侥幸脱险。Jason G. Goldman报道。

撰文播音：贾森·G·戈德曼（Jason G. Goldman）

翻译：邱燕宁

审校：郭晓

At about 7:30 P.M. on September 7, 2017, Hurricane Irma reached the Turks and Caicos Islands. By the next morning, the neighborhood called Blue Hill was gone. And on South Caicos Island, 75 percent of rooftops were obliterated. Two weeks later, Hurricane Maria followed in Irma's destructive footsteps. 

2017年9月7日下午7点30分左右，飓风伊玛抵达特克斯和凯科斯群岛。到第二天早上，附近的一个叫蓝山的地区已被彻底侵袭。在凯科斯南部岛上，75%的屋顶被夷为平地。两周后，飓风玛丽亚紧随伊玛的破坏性脚步而来。

And Harvard University biologist Colin Donihue happened to be there a few days before the hurricanes blew through.

"The Turks and Caicos islands is home to a couple of different endemic species of lizard, that's lizards that are only found there. We were interested in one in particular, called Anolis scriptus, the Turks and Caicos anole."

哈佛大学生物学家Colin Donihue在飓风爆发前几天碰巧在那里。

“特克斯和凯科斯群岛是当地几种不同的蜥蜴的家园，这些蜥蜴只有在那里才能找到。我们对其中一种特别感兴趣，叫做Anolis scriptus，特克斯和凯科斯变色蜥”。

The mission of that first expedition, before the two hurricanes, was to assay the lizard population in anticipation of a program to eradicate the islands of invasive rats—which threaten the lizards. This work included taking detailed measurements of the bodies of lizards they trapped and released. 

在这两次飓风之前，首次研究考察的任务是检验蜥蜴的数量，以期能制定出一项计划来消灭威胁蜥蜴的入侵性老鼠。这项工作包括对被捕获和释放的蜥蜴的身体进行详细的测量。

The researchers intended to return several years later, after the rats were gone, to re-assess the lizards. But that plan changed. 

研究人员打算在老鼠被消灭后的几年之后返回，重新评估蜥蜴。但是这个计划改变了。

“We realized after the hurricanes had come through that we had a really serendipitous opportunity to test this question of whether hurricanes can act as agents of natural selection on wild populations in their path. Now this had never really been asked before, because hurricanes are just really hard to predict…we just happened to be in the right place at the right time to have that baseline data."

“在飓风来袭之后，我们意识到，我们有一个非常偶然的机会来检验这个问题，即飓风是否能够作为自然选择的媒介，影响其途径的野生种群。这个问题在以前从未被问及过，因为飓风真的很难预测……我们只是碰巧在正确的时间，在正确的地点获得了基底数据。”

Which is why he and his team returned to the archipelago…just six weeks after his first visit.

这就是为什么他和他的团队在第一次访问后六周就再次回到群岛的原因。

They expected that lizards with longer limbs and larger toe pads would be the ones better able to cling to trees and therefore more likely to survive the storms. And they were almost right. Longer front legs and larger toe pads indeed helped. But shorter hindlimbs were actually better. The results are in the journal Nature. [Colin M. Donihue, et al., Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard]

他们预计，肢体较长、脚趾垫较大的蜥蜴将能更好地抓住树木，因此更有可能在暴风雨中存活下来。他们几乎是对的。较长的前腿和较大的脚趾垫确实有帮助，但是短的后肢实际上更好。研究结果发表在《自然》杂志上。

To figure out these counterintuitive findings, the researchers conducted an experiment in a hotel room. They rounded up some lizards, gave them a perch, and used a leaf blower to mimic the effects of high winds. They set up a net to catch any lizards that lost their grip. 

为了解释这些反常的发现，研究人员在旅馆房间里做了一个实验。他们收集了一些蜥蜴，给它们一个栖木，用一个吹树叶机模拟强风的效果。他们拉起了一个网捕捉那些失去抓力被吹落的蜥蜴。

As the artificial wind blew, the lizards moved so the perch took most of the air flow. But their hind legs would stick out—and if those rear limbs stuck out too far, they acted as sails. 

随着人工风的吹拂，蜥蜴进行移动，所以栖木承受了大部分气流。但是它们的后腿会伸出来，如果它们的后肢伸得太远，后腿就会像帆一样。

"Eventually those back legs were blown off the perch, and the lizards were just holding on with their front two legs. And they could only hold on like that for so long as the wind speed increased further and further, until they were blown off the perch and into the nets."

最后，那些后腿从栖木上被吹走了，而蜥蜴只是用前腿支撑。他们只能这样坚持下去，风速越来越大，直到他们被吹离了栖木并落入网中。”

So shorter back legs gave a survival advantage. A trait that might be passed on to the next lizard generation. 

因此，短的后腿具有生存优势。这个特征可能会传给下一代蜥蜴。