Tagged Penguins 带标记企鹅健康受影响

By Richard Black, BBC News

The king penguin is the second largest species

媒体英语会带大家一起学习BBC撰稿人在报道世界大事时常用到的单词和短语。

Background: 生物学家多年来一直通过给企鹅做标记的方法来监视企鹅的行踪。法国科学家近日指出，此举动不仅会给企鹅的健康带来危害，而且还对已收集到的有关气候变化的数据产生质疑。

For decades scientists have been following penguins by putting bands around their flippers.

This allows individual birds to be identified at a distance.

But there have been concerns that flipper bands might harm the birds by slowing them down as they swim.

The latest study, reported in the journal Nature, confirms it. Scientists from Strasbourg University followed a colony of king penguins for ten years.

Birds fitted with bands died younger, started breeding later in the year, took longer to forage for food and over all raised about 40 per cent fewer chicks.

The researchers suggest that using flipper bands would now be unethical in most situations.

Scientists in the field would now have to find other tagging methods but in the meantime there are also concerns that some data gathered on penguins down the years, in this ecological crucial part of the planet, may now be worthless.