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Big Animal Extinction Impoverishes Soil
大型动物灭亡贫瘠了土壤
By about 10,000 years ago, nearly 100 species of large animals had been recently driven to extinction around the globe. This march of megafauna mortality coincides suspiciously with the arrival of another large animal in their vicinity: humans.
大约一万年前，世界范围内大约有100种左右的大型动物灭绝。与此同时，附近的另一种大型动物，人类到来了。
The die-off in South America included giant ground sloths and armadillo-like animals the size of cars known as glyptodonts. And the deaths seem responsible for the dearth of nutrients in Amazon rainforest soils today. So says a study in the journal Nature Geoscience.
南美洲灭亡的动物包括大型地懒和一种犰狳科动物，足足有汽车大小的雕齿兽。它们的灭亡似乎跟现在亚马逊雨林土壤的营养流失有关。《自然地理科学》杂志上一片研究这样表示。
Plainly put, these big animals disperse a lot of phosphorous in their feces. Once the big animals are gone, there's no way for the phosphorous to get from one part of the rainforest to another. As a result, the Amazon rainforest even today is struggling to recover from that loss of fertility.
说白了，这些大型动物排泄物里面有很多磷元素。一旦这些大型动物灭绝了，磷元素就无法在雨林里流通。结果就是就算是今天的亚马逊雨林也正在从营养流失中恢复。
Other parts of the world face the same poop paucity predicament, according to the researchers’ model. But the impact outside the Amazon was less severe, for reasons still unknown. What is clear is that the impact of extinction reverberates down through the millennia, a clear signal that we’ve been living in the Anthropocene for a while.
研究人员的模型显示，世界上其他地方也面临粪便缺乏的困境。但是亚马逊雨林之外的地区没那么严重，原因未知。现在很清楚的是，经过了数千年之后，这些大型动物灭亡带来的影响正在减弱，我们已经在人类纪生活了有段时间了。
—David Biello
