科学美国人精选-海藻保护珊瑚-智课教育旗下智课教育资料.pdfVIP

智 课 网 托 福 备 考 资 料 科学美国人精选-海藻保护珊瑚-智课教育旗下智课教育 本文和大家分享的是科学美国人精选-海藻保护珊瑚。大家可以参 考一下，在备考过程中多积累一些背景知识。相信会对同学们的备考有 所帮助。 本篇文章是智课教育小编为大家整理科学美国人文章，这篇文章很 适合作为托福听力的背景知识来运用，对于背景知识大家要学会积累， 而且背景材料的分析也很重要，请看下文分析。 原文： Crown-of-thorns sea stars are an underwater swarm of locusts that devour coral—unless the coral is protected by a layer of seaweed. Christopher Intagliata reports Warmer, more acidic oceans are already damaging corals in the South Pacific. But the corals also have more visible foes: such as crown-of-thorns sea stars. Its an underwater swarm of locusts with a stomach that can be turned wrong side out and digest you as it walks across. Mark Hay, a marine ecologist at Georgia Tech. You just look in front of them and theres good corals, and you look behind them and theres these white skeletons. Hay says the corals in Fijis marine protected areas are particularly vulnerable to attack. So he and his colleague Cody Clements took a closer look at the underwater ecosystem there. And they discovered something weird. Neighboring seaweeds usually compete for resources with corals to the point where they will whip corals with their fronds and poison them with toxins. But the researchers found that, in this case, the seaweeds were saving the corals, blocking the marauding sea stars. And so these competitors were really acting as kind of bodyguards for the corals, once things got bad. Hay and Clements replicated those observations in underwater experiments, in which even fake seaweed did the trick—suggesting that seaweed is simply passively blocking the predators. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The marine reserves in Fiji are relatively small. And they border lots of degraded reefs, which Hay suspects are playgrounds for baby sea stars. When the stars get older and hungrier, he says, pristine corals are right next door. They kind of act like little piles of candy that you put out