字神帝國英語天地

今日主題：Social Spider Groups Need Bold and Shy Members / 蜘蛛也存在個性差異

洪欣老師推薦：托福聽力最好的課外教材：60-Second Science
康康精選托福會考的主題，堅持每天精聽一定會進步的哦!!

建議方法：
1. 先聽兩三遍 (不看文稿)
2. 再一句一句聽寫 (每句都要聽寫數遍，直到寫出85%以上的字)
3. 最後check文稿，看哪聽不出來，單字沒背過，還是發音不熟。
4. 堅持天天聽，就能每天進步哦。

MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：喜歡的同學，幫忙推或按讚哦~~
http://online1.tingclass.net/voaspe/…/20160628sa_science.mp3

只有音檔怎夠，聽不懂地方，不用怕，康康幫你準備好中英文稿了：

中英文稿：
What has eight legs, eight eyes, and lives together with thousands of others like it? Arachnophobia sufferers do not want to hear the answer—which is, spiders that live in large social groups.
什麼東西有八條腿，八隻眼睛，並與成千上萬的其他相同物種居住在一起？蜘蛛恐懼症患者絕不希望聽到的答案——這就是生活在龐大社會群體中的蜘蛛。

It's pretty rare to find such group-living spiders. Of the 45,000 spider species we know about, only about 25 are social. These species weave massive webs and dwell in colonies of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual spiders.
找到群居生活的蜘蛛是很罕見的。在我們所了解的45000種蜘蛛物種中，只有25種蜘蛛是群居生活。這些蜘蛛可以編織出巨大的網，數十隻、數百隻甚至數千隻蜘蛛群體居住。

"When we want to count the spiders inside the colony, what we do is, somebody rips apart the colony, basically, with their hands. We call it 'making it rain,' and then dozens or hundreds of spiders basically shower down on little silken lines like little parachuters." University of California Santa Barbara arachnologist Jonathan Pruitt.
“如果我們想要計算群居地內的蜘蛛數量，我們要做的是有人要用手撕破它們的群居地。我們稱之為“下雨”，然後數十或數百隻蜘蛛從絲上紛紛降落下來，像小傘兵一樣。”聖塔芭芭拉加州大學蜘蛛學家喬納森•普瑞特說道。

He and his students study social spiders in South Africa's Kalahari Desert. After counting and weighing hundreds of African social spiders, Pruitt and his team gave each spider a personality assessment—some are bold, others shy. They wanted to understand how the personality composition of a colony influences its interactions with predators, and how the colony behaved over time.
他和他的學生們在南非卡拉哈里沙漠研究群居蜘蛛。在對數百隻群居蜘蛛計數及稱量之後，普瑞特和他的團隊給每隻蜘蛛進行個性評估——有些是大膽的，其他是害羞的。他們想了解群體的個性成分是如何影響與捕食者交互的，以及隨著時間的推移，這個群體如何表現。

So the researchers combined their spiders into artificial groupings. Some of the experimental colonies were composed only of bold spiders, others of shy ones, and some had the two personality types in equal proportion. Then the researchers introduced predators to the party.
因此，研究人員對他們的蜘蛛進行人工分組。一些實驗群體只由大膽的蜘蛛組成，另一實驗群體由害羞及擁有雙重個性的蜘蛛組成，數量上等比例。然後研究人員向群體引進捕食者。

"The most voracious predator that they deal with is this pugnacious ant, Anoplolepis steingroveri, which is this horrible ant. If you dropped one of these social spiders onto the ground, it's identified in seconds. And so these ants rip it apart and then drag it over to their colony."
它們需要應對的最貪婪的捕食者是這只好鬥的螞蟻，捷蟻，就是這只可怕的螞蟻。如果你將其中一隻群體蜘蛛扔到地面上，在數秒之內它就會被識別，然後這些螞蟻會將它撕碎，拖到它們的群居地。

Turned out that the mixed-personality colonies were best able to learn from the repeated threat of ant raids, and build defensive nests to ward off attackers. Both the all-bold and all-shy colonies were less able to get it together enough to create their defensive structures, presumably because of too many—or not enough—leaders. The results are in the journal Animal Behaviour. [Colin M. Wright, Carl N. Keiser, & Jonathan N. Pruitt. Colony personality composition alters colony-level plasticity and magnitude of defensive behaviour in a social spider.]
結果證明，擁有混合個性的群體最有能力從反复的螞蟻襲擊威脅中吸取教訓並建立防禦巢，以抵禦攻擊。大膽的蜘蛛群體與害羞的蜘蛛群體都不太善於建造自己的防禦建築。大概是因為有太多或沒有足夠的領導者。該項研究結果發表在《動物行為》雜誌上。

"The cool thing about social spiders is we know that they have these personality differences, and we know that societies are organized along these individual differences in behavior—actually very similar to the way that human societies are organized in a lot of ways."
關於群體蜘蛛最好玩兒的地方是我們知道它們在個性上存在差異，根據這些在行為上的個體差異可以組建群體，這在很多方面非常類似於人類社會的組建方式。