神秘的盲“幽靈魚”發(fā)現(xiàn)剛果河是世界上最深的河流

神秘的盲“幽靈魚”發(fā)現(xiàn)剛果河是世界上最深的河流

The waters of the Congo River in Africa are some of the world's most mysterious. This is the river that inspired Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"; it crosses the equator twice, cuts through the world's second largest rainforest, and its basin is home to some of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet.

非洲的剛果河是世界上最神秘的水域之一。這條河啟發(fā)了約瑟夫·康拉德的《黑暗之心》;它穿過赤道兩次，穿過世界第二大雨林，其盆地是地球上生物多樣性最高的地方之一。

And only just now have we discovered the true depth of this beguiling waterway.

直到現(xiàn)在，我們才發(fā)現(xiàn)這條迷人水道的真正深度。

The Congo River is the deepest river in the world. (Photo: Bsm15 [CC BY-SA 3.0]/Wikimedia Commons Commons [CC 3.0 License])

It turns out, the Congo River is also the world's deepest. It has underwater worlds we never knew existed, and strange creatures lurking in its hidden abysses.

事實(shí)證明，剛果河也是世界上最深的河流。它有我們從來不知道存在過的海底世界，還有隱藏在它的深淵里的奇怪的動(dòng)物。

The first hints at just how deep this river ran came a few years ago, when peculiar ghost-white fish began washing up on the Congo's lower shores. These fish looked like cave fish; they were blind, with pale-bleach skin, like organisms adapted to life in dark caverns concealed from the light for millennia. But this was a roaring river, and there were no caves around from where these fish could have emerged.

關(guān)于這條河到底有多深，最早的跡象出現(xiàn)在幾年前，當(dāng)時(shí)奇怪的幽靈魚開始在剛果的低海岸上涌上來。這些魚看起來像洞穴魚;他們雙目失明，皮膚呈淡白色，就像適應(yīng)了黑暗洞穴生活的有機(jī)體，幾千年來一直隱藏在光線下。但這是一條咆哮的河流，周圍沒有洞穴可以讓這些魚出現(xiàn)。

Melanie Stiassny, an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History, was among the first scientists on the scene. She noticed a clue: these fish would die almost immediately upon flopping ashore, with bubbles seeming to fizz from beneath their skin and from their gills, reports Cosmos.

美國自然歷史博物館的魚類學(xué)家梅勒妮·斯蒂亞斯尼是第一批到達(dá)現(xiàn)場的科學(xué)家之一。她注意到一個(gè)線索:這些魚幾乎一上岸就會(huì)立即死去，皮膚下和鰓上的氣泡似乎在嘶嘶作響，Cosmos報(bào)道。

Stiassny recognized the symptoms. These blind ghosts were suffering from the bends.

斯蒂亞斯尼意識(shí)到了這些癥狀。這些盲魚患了減壓病。

“This animal was dying from catastrophic decompression syndrome,” she said.

“這種動(dòng)物死于災(zāi)難性的減壓綜合癥，”她說。

Decompression syndrome is the same thing that happens to human divers when they experience a rapid pressure change, such as when a diver ascends from the depths too quickly. For this fish to have experienced this condition, it too would have had to rise rapidly from some fathomless depth.

減壓綜合癥和人類潛水員經(jīng)歷壓力急劇變化時(shí)發(fā)生的情況是一樣的，比如潛水員從深處上升的速度過快。這條魚要經(jīng)歷這種情況，也必須從一個(gè)深不可測的深度迅速地浮上來。

“This fish dying in my hand asked the question, ‘Could there be deep water here?’”

“這條死在我手里的魚提出了一個(gè)問題，‘這里會(huì)有深水嗎?’”

So Stiassny gathered a group of whitewater kayakers, armed with depth-measuring equipment, for an expedition to map the unknown deepness of this most mysterious of rivers. What they found was astonishing.

因此，斯蒂亞斯尼召集了一群皮劃艇漂流者，配備了深度測量設(shè)備，準(zhǔn)備進(jìn)行一次探險(xiǎn)，繪制這條最神秘河流的未知深度地圖。他們的發(fā)現(xiàn)令人震驚。

The Congo has obscure pockets that aren't just deep, they're immensely deep. The team measured certain parts that were over 700 feet deep, in fact. And that's not all. Doppler current profilers showed that some of these pockets contain their own hidden worlds, cut off from the rest of the world by strong ascending and descending currents and powerful swirling eddies. These currents essentially act as boundaries that can't be crossed, allowing the creatures within them to evolve separately from their free-swimming brethren.

剛果有一些不為人知的地方，它們不僅深，而且不可思議的深。事實(shí)上，研究小組測量了超過700英尺深的部分。這還不是全部。多普勒洋流剖面儀顯示，這些口袋中有一些隱藏著自己的世界，它們被強(qiáng)大的上升和下降洋流以及強(qiáng)大的漩渦與世界的其他部分隔開。這些洋流本質(zhì)上充當(dāng)著不可逾越的邊界，允許它們內(nèi)部的生物與自由游動(dòng)的同類分開進(jìn)化。

“They are dividing up populations and preventing them from interbreeding at a very fine geographical scale,” said Stiassny. “So you can see why there’s a lot of [diversity].”

“它們正在分割種群，防止它們在非常精細(xì)的地理范圍內(nèi)進(jìn)行雜交，”斯蒂亞斯尼說。“所以你可以看到為什么會(huì)有這么多(多樣性)。”

The blind ghost fish were coming from one of these deep cave-like pockets, beyond the glare of the equatorial sunlight. They had likely escaped their pitch-black underworld after being swept up in a strong current and brought to the surface in a rapid instant. If only they had eyes to see, what light-drenched wonder they might have gazed upon before succumbing to the pressure change.

這些看不見的幽靈魚是從這些洞穴似的深口袋里鉆出來的，在赤道耀眼的陽光照射不到的地方。他們很可能是在被一股強(qiáng)大的水流沖到地面后，在瞬間被帶到地面上來的。要是他們能看得見，在屈服于壓力的變化之前，他們會(huì)看到多么透光的奇跡。

The discovery was a wake-up call for Stiassny, a reminder that there might be whole new realms to uncover beneath the stirring waters of the Congo. There might be species there that we've never seen before, trapped for generations by the river's vortices.

這一發(fā)現(xiàn)為斯蒂亞斯尼敲響了警鐘，提醒他在剛果激蕩的水面下可能有全新的領(lǐng)域有待發(fā)現(xiàn)。那里可能有我們從未見過的物種，被河流的漩渦困住了好幾代。

She noted that the Lower Congo is an unexplored natural laboratory for studying how species evolve. It's a domain where you don't need actual caves to harbor blind cave fish, where adaptations to obscure niches might turn up bizarre traits, and where biological mysteries unveil themselves to reveal hidden provinces of ghostly critters.

她指出，剛果河下是一個(gè)未被探索的自然實(shí)驗(yàn)室，用于研究物種是如何進(jìn)化的。在這個(gè)領(lǐng)域里，你不需要真正的洞穴來庇護(hù)盲目的洞穴魚，適應(yīng)隱藏的壁龕可能會(huì)出現(xiàn)奇怪的特征，生物奧秘揭示自己，揭示幽靈般的生物隱藏的領(lǐng)域。