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This is Goliath, the krill. Don't get too attached.
这是歌利亚，一只磷虾。不要对它太迷恋了。
Today this 1 centimeter crustacean will share the same fate as 40 million of his closest friends: a life sentence in the belly of the largest blue whale in the world.
今天，这只1厘米长的甲壳类动物将会与它4000万的亲密朋友们遭受同样的命运：在世上最大的蓝鲸的肚子里囚禁终生。
Let's call her Leviatha. Leviatha weighs something like 150 metric tons, and she's the largest animal in the world.
让我们称她为利维坦。利维坦重约150吨，是世界上最大的动物。
But she's not even close to being the largest organism by weight, which is estimated to equal about 40 Leviatha's.
但她还远算不上是最重的生物体。后者的重量大约相当于40只利维坦。
So where is this behemoth? Here, in Utah. Sorry, that's too close. Here.
那么这只巨兽在哪里呢？这里，在犹他州。对不起，离得太近了。这里。
This is Pando, whose name means "I spread out." Pando, a quaking aspen, has roughly 47,000 genetically identical clone trunks.
这是潘多；名字意为“我分散开来”。它是一种白杨，拥有大约47000枝基因相同的克隆树干。
Those all grow from one enormous root system, which is why scientists consider Pando a single organism.
这些全部都从同一个庞大的根茎系统生长出来，这就是什么科学家们认为潘多是一个单一的生物体。
Pando is the clear winner of world's largest organism by weight -- an incredible 6 million kilograms.
潘多无疑是世界上最重的生物体--600万公斤的重量令人难以置信。
So how did Pando get to be so huge? Pando is not an unusual aspen from a genetic standpoint.
那么，潘多何以变得如此巨大？从基因角度来看，潘多并不是一种不寻常的杨树。
Rather, Pando's size boils down to three main factors: its age, its location, and aspens' remarkable evolutionary adaptation of self-cloning.
确切地说，潘多之所以拥有这样的规模，要归结于三个主要因素：它的年龄、生长地点，以及杨树非凡的自我克隆的进化适应性。
So first, Pando is incredibly expansive because it's incredibly old. How old exactly? No one knows.
首先，因为极其古老，所以潘多的分布极其辽阔。到底有多古老呢？没人知道。
Dendrochronologist estimates range from 80,000 to 1 million years. The problem is, there's no simple way to gauge Pando's age.
年轮学家估计它的年龄在8万到100万年之间。问题就在于，没有用来测量潘多年龄的简单方法。
Counting the rings of a single trunk will only account for up to 200 years or so, as Pando is in a constant cycle of growth, death, and renewal.
计算单一树干的年轮只能算到200年左右；而同时，潘多处在生长、死亡和更新的持续循环中。
On average, each individual tree lives 130 years, before falling and being replaced by new ones.
每棵树平均会生长130年，之后才会倒下，被新的树所取代。
Second: location. During the last ice age, which ended about 12,000 years ago, glaciers covered much of the North American climate friendly to aspens.
其次，地点。最后一次冰川纪大约结束于12000年前，在这期间，冰川覆盖了北美大部分适于白杨生长的气候区。
So if there were other comparably sized clonal colonies, they may have perished then. Meanwhile, Pando's corner of Utah remained glacier-free.
所以，如果还曾有过其它规模类似的克隆植物群的话，它们很可能都在那时消亡了。然而，潘多所在的犹他州的一角却没有冰川。
The soil there is rich in nutrients that Pando continuously replenishes; as it drops leaves and trunks, the nutrients return to nourish new generations of clones.
那里的土壤富含养料，而潘多又在对其不断补充；当它的叶子和树枝掉落时，营养返回土壤，以滋养新一代的克隆植株。
Which brings us to the third cause of Pando's size: cloning.
这就将我们引向了潘多形成如今规模的第三个原因：克隆。
Aspens are capable of both sexual reproduction -- which produces a new organism -- and asexual reproduction -- which creates a clone.
白杨既可以有性繁殖--产生出一个新的生物体，也可以进行无性繁殖--创造一棵克隆植株。
They tend to reproduce sexually when conditions are unfavorable and the best strategy for survival is to move elsewhere.
当条件不利时，它们倾向于有性繁殖，而且最有利于生存的策略是迁移到其它地方。
Trees aren't particularly mobile, but their seeds are.
树木并不具有特别的可移动性，但是它们的种子可以。
Like the rest of us, sexual reproduction is how Pando came into the world in the first place all those tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
与我们一样，有性繁殖是潘多在几十万或者几百万年前最初来到世上的方式。
The wind or a pollinator carried pollen from the flower of one of its parents to the other, where a sperm cell fertilized an egg.
风或者传粉的昆虫把花粉从亲本植株中的一棵带到另一棵，在那里精子细胞使卵子受精。
That flower produced fruit, which split open, releasing hundreds of tiny, light seeds.
那朵花结出果实，果实再破裂开来，释放出大量轻微的种子。
The wind carried one to a wet spot of land in what is now Utah, where it took root and germinated into Pando's first stem.
风把一粒种子带到了现今犹他州的一块湿地上，它在那里生了根，发了芽，长成了潘多的第一枝主杆。
A couple of years later, Pando grew mature enough to reproduce asexually.
几年后，潘多生长成熟，足以进行无性繁殖。
Asexual reproduction, or cloning, tends to happen when the environment is favorable to growth.
无性生殖，或者克隆，往往发生在环境适于生长的时候。
Aspens have long roots that burrow through the soil. These can sprout shoots that grow up into new trunks.
白杨有着钻透土壤的长根茎。它们可以抽芽，长出新的树干。
And while Pando grew and spread out, so did our ancestors.
在潘多生长蔓延的时候，我们的祖先也做着同样的事情。
As Hunter-gatherers who made cave paintings, survived an ice age, found their way to North America, built civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, fought wars,
作为狩猎采集者，他们创造了洞穴画，活过了冰川纪，设法到达了北美洲，在埃及和美索不达米亚创造了文明，发动战争，
domesticated animals, fought wars, formed nations, built machines, and invented the internet, and always newer ways to fight wars.
驯服动物，再发动战争，建立了国家，制造了机器，还发明了国际互联网，而且总是能找到新的战争形式。
Pando has survived many millennia of changing climates and encroaching ice. But it may not survive us.
经过几千年的气候变化和冰川侵蚀，潘多存活了下来。但是，它也许敌不过人类的活动。
New stems are growing to maturity much more slowly than they need to in order to replace the trunks that fall.
新主杆的成熟速度大大慢于它所需要的用以更新倒落枝干的速度。
Scientists have identified two main reasons for this. The first is that we've deprived Pando of fire.
为此，科学家已经确定了两个主要原因：首先，潘多失去了发生林火的机会。
When a fire clears a patch of forest, Aspen roots survive, and send shoots bursting up out of the ground by the tens of thousands.
当大火清除了一片森林时，白杨的根却可以存活下来，而且，成千上万的新枝会破土而出。
And secondly, grazers like herds of cattle and mule deer -- whose natural predators we've hunted to the point of local elimination -- are eating Pando's fresh growth.
第二，食草动物，如成群的牛和美洲黑尾鹿--它们的天敌已经被我们猎杀到几近局部灭绝的地步--会啃食潘多新生的枝桠。
If we lose the world's largest organism, we'll lose a scientific treasure trove.
如果我们失去了世上最大的生物体，那么我们将失去一个科学宝藏。
Because Pando's trunks are genetically identical, they can serve as a controlled setting for studies on everything from the tree microbiome to the influence of climate on tree growth rates.
因为潘多的枝干基因相同，所以它们可以作为一个受控环境，用来研究所有从树的微生物群到气候对树木生长率的影响的相关课题。
The good news is, we have a chance to save Pando, by reducing livestock grazing in the area and further protecting the vulnerable young saplings.
好消息是，我们有机会拯救潘多；这要通过减少在这一区域内放牧的牲畜和进一步保护脆弱的幼树来实现。
And the time to act is today. Because as with so many other marvels of our natural world, once they're gone it will be a very, very long time before they return.
行动的时间就在今日。因为，同自然界中许多其它奇迹一样，一旦消失，它们的回归就会需要很长很长的时间。
