Critters living more than six miles below the ocean surface contain high levels of harmful compounds like PCBs and flame retardants. Julia Rosen reports. 

据朱莉娅·罗森（Julia Rosen）报道，生活在海面六英里以下的小动物体内含有高剂量的有害化合物，如多氯联苯和阻燃剂。

撰文\播音：朱莉娅·罗森（Julia Rosen）

翻译：杨枭

审校：丁可含

The Mariana Trench is the deepest spot in the world’s oceans. Only three humans have ventured into the trench in submersibles. But plenty of our pollution has made the voyage to the bottom of the sea: a new study finds that critters living more than six miles below the ocean surface contain high levels of harmful compounds like polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and flame retardants.

马里亚纳海沟是世界海洋最深的地方。只有三个人乘潜水艇深入过海沟。但是我们的污染物却已到了海底：一项新研究发现，生活在海面六英里以下的小动物体内含有高剂量有害化合物，如多氯联苯和阻燃剂。

“An important thing is that, if you’re in the deepest place in world, there’s no place to go.”

“重要的是，如果你在世界最深处，你没有任何其他地方可以去。”

Alan Jamieson, a marine ecologist at Newcastle University in the U.K. 

艾伦·贾米森（Alan Jamieson）是英国纽卡斯尔大学的海洋生态学家。

“You can’t be disturbed horizontally. You can’t go back up. So, for every nanogram of pollutant that’s gone into the deep sea, there’s no mechanism to put it back again. So, of course the values are going to be high, cause it’s only a one way traffic, right?”

“你不能水平移动。你也不能退回上面。所以对于每纳米立方进入深海的污染物来说，没有任何机制让它退回去。因此，因为只有一条下沉的路可走，深海污染物浓度很高，对吧？”

Jamieson and his colleagues used robotic traps to collect deep-sea amphipods living in the most remote parts of the oceans. These creatures look a bit like shrimp, and they’re well adapted to their extreme environment, he says. 

贾米森和他的同事用机器人捕捉器收集生活在海洋最深处的片脚类动物。他说，这些生物看起来有点像虾，可以很好地适应极端环境。

“The deep sea-ones are incredible scavengers. This is why they thrive in the deep sea, because it’s a low-food environment where most of their food comes from dead carcasses raining from the surface or particulates coming down. So, everything from an organic particle to a dead whale is fair game to an amphipod.”

“深海生物是令人难以置信的清道夫。他们在深海茁壮成长，是因为深海作为一个低食环境，大部分食物都来自表面尸体的沉降。因此，对于深海片脚类动物来说，从有机粒子到一头死鲸鱼都是公平游戏。”

The food that floats down to the ocean bottom carries man-made contaminants, including PCBs, which entered the surface ocean from rivers and coastlines. Companies stopped manufacturing these chemicals in the 1970s, after they were found to be dangerous. But they don’t break down easily, so they’re still swirling around in the oceans and working their way down to the seafloor, where amphipods gobble them up. 

漂浮到海底的食物会携带包括多氯联苯的人造污染物，这些污染物沿着河流和海岸线进入海洋。在发现这些化学物质的危险性后，公司在20世纪70年代停产了这些化学物质。但是因为它们不容易分解，所以仍然在海洋中漂转，流入海底，最后被片脚类动物吞食。

The research was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. [Alan J. Jamieson et al., Bioaccumulation of persistent organic pollutants in the deepest ocean fauna]

该研究发表在期刊《自然·生态与进化》上。

In many surface-dwelling species, PCBs have been shown to interfere with animals’ abilities to reproduce. Jamieson says they don’t have enough data yet to know how deep-sea amphipods are faring, because they’re much harder to study. But he says that wasn’t his motivation for studying pollutants in the deep ocean.

多氯联苯已被证明会影响物种繁殖。贾米森表示，鉴于深海片脚类动物更难研究，他们还没有足够的数据来了解污染物对其影响。但他说这不是他研究深海污染物的动机。

“The point is that they are there. It’s to challenge people’s perception that the deep sea is not exempt from what’s happening in the rest of the world. And that’s a perception we hear quite a lot of.”

“关键在于污染物的位置。我们曾听说过很多次，深海不受人类活动影响。但我们的研究颠覆了这种观念。”