当欧洲殖民者首次抵达澳大利亚的新南威尔士州，野生家鼠也随着舰队踏上了这个曾经与世隔绝的大陆。从那以后，几乎每隔5到10年就会爆发一次鼠灾。今年极端天气引发澳洲数十年来最严重的鼠患。这轮鼠灾是因何而起？还有解决的办法吗？
After fire and floods, Aussie farmers suffer devastating mouse plague…
Australia’s southern and eastern agricultural regions are deep in the thick of a months-long plague of mice that has destroyed crops and overwhelmed farmers. The infestation comes after years of drought, devastating wildfires and a period of heavy rain that boosted plant growth, creating ideal conditions for the hungry rodents to reproduce exponentially. Now farms and fields are overrun with swarms of mice that have taken up residence in the walls of barns and homes.
澳大利亚南部和东部农业区深陷长达数月的鼠灾，这些老鼠摧毁庄稼，令农民苦不堪言。多年的干旱、毁灭性的野火和长时间的大雨促进了植物的生长，但也为饥饿的啮齿动物疯狂繁殖创造了理想的条件。现在农场和田地里到处都是成群结队的老鼠，它们成群聚集在谷仓和房屋的墙壁上。
注释：
infestation：骚扰，侵袭，扰害，横行；（盗贼、鼠、虫等的）成群出现;
exponentially：以指数方式;
Mice first appeared in Australia with the arrival of British colonists in 1788. These days the continent sees populations boom and die off every few years. But many farmers say this year’s infestation is the worst they have ever seen, and there is no sign that it is letting up soon. “The prolonged rain and the bumper crop of food means that the rodents have lots to eat for a very long time,” says Steven Belmain, an ecologist at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in England, who studies rodents’ roles as agricultural pests and disease vectors. Scientific American spoke with Belmain about how climate change has influenced the infestation in Australia, whether other parts of the world could see similar outbreaks and if the present one could lead to the spread of illness.
随着 1788 年英国殖民者的到来，老鼠首次出现在澳大利亚。如今，澳大利亚每隔几年就会爆发一次鼠灾。但许多农民表示，今年的鼠灾是他们见过的最严重的一次，而且丝毫没有缓解的迹象。英格兰格林威治大学自然资源研究所的生态学家史蒂文•贝尔曼 (Steven Belmain)是研究啮齿类动物对农业产生的灾害及传播疾病方面的专家，他说：“长时间的降雨和丰收的农作物意味着啮齿动物在很长一段时间内都有很多食物。”
2021年3月澳大利亚居民报告的老鼠出没频率 / 华盛顿邮报
Is the current outbreak of mice in Australia surprising?
澳洲目前的鼠害是突如其来的吗？
When the rain started quite severely, a lot of the scientists had an idea we were going to be in for a mouse plague. It wasn’t a great surprise to many of the experts because they have had these outbreaks going back more than 100 years in Australia. They’re periodic, and they are always sort of related to these bumper years of rainfall and wheat production. This one is quite large, but I think that is because the rainfall was particularly widespread. It’s predictable in the very short term—there is no great pattern to them. You can’t say once a decade or once every five years this happens; it really is down to the cycles of the rains.
当开始下大雨时，很多科学家都就预测即将爆发鼠灾。许多专家对此并不感到意外，因为这种鼠害爆发在澳大利亚已经有 100 多年了。它们是周期性的，总是与这些丰收年的降雨和小麦产量有关。而这次鼠灾爆发范围非常广，但我认为那是因为降雨特别广泛。在短期内鼠灾是可以预测的——他们没有很好的模式。你不能说这种情况每十年或每五年肯定会发生一次，但这确实取决于降雨的周期。
注释：
periodic：间发性的; 定期的; 周期的
[例句]Periodic checks are carried out on the equipment. 设备定期进行检查。
Why is there a mouse plague?
鼠灾爆发的原因是什么？
The mouse plague has been caused by a "perfect storm" of optimal weather conditions for breeding and the end of the 2017 to 2019 drought. The mice first appeared in the spring of 2020 when farmers were harvesting a bumper crop.
鼠灾是由适合繁殖的最佳天气条件和 2017 年至 2019 年干旱结束引起的。老鼠于 2020 年春季首次出现，当时农民正在迎来丰收。
There was plenty of grain in the paddocks and in storage for the mice to eat, as well as fewer predators, which died during the drought.
围场和仓库中有充足的谷物供老鼠食用，而在干旱期捕食老鼠的动物很多都已经死掉了。
That year regional New South Wales had a particularly mild, moist summer that allowed the mice to keep breeding throughout summer and into autumn.
那一年新南威尔士地区的夏季特别温和潮湿，这使得老鼠可以在整个夏季和秋季繁殖。
What impact might this infestation have beyond agriculture? Is there risk of disease spread?
除了对农业以外，这种鼠灾还可能产生什么其他影响？有传播疾病的风险吗？
In times of pandemic, we become more sensitive to the fact that rodents are great disease transmitters. More than 60 different diseases are transmitted by rodents.
在新冠疫情期间，我们对啮齿动物是重要的疾病传播者这一事实变得更加敏感。啮齿动物可以传播 60 多种不同的疾病。
In other parts of the world, particularly in parts of Africa and Asia where the disease burden is higher, they are worried about things such as leptospirosis and plague [the disease caused by Yersinia pestis], which follow the population cycles. So bigger population events do lead to increased disease transmission in some cases, but I don’t think that applies really very much to Australia.
在世界其他地区，特别是在疾病负担较高的非洲和亚洲部分地区，他们担心钩端螺旋体病和鼠疫（鼠疫耶尔森菌引起的疾病）等随着人口周期变化。因此，在某些情况下，更大的人口群体确实会导致疾病传播的增加，但我认为这对澳大利亚不太适用。
老鼠惊人的繁殖速度
What efforts are there to mitigate this infestation?
有哪些努力可以减轻鼠疫传染？
What they’re continuing to do is baiting with zinc phosphide. The advantage of zinc phosphide is that it doesn’t accumulate in the environment, so the danger of other animals having long-term exposure to some poison is minimized. But of course, when you put it out there, everything that eats it is going to die, so this could be a danger to pets.
他们一直在使用的是用磷化锌作为诱杀剂。磷化锌的优点是它不会在环境中积累，因此其他动物接触到这种毒物的危险被降到最低。但是当然，当你把它投放在外界时，所有食入它的动物都会死，所以这可能对宠物构成危险。
How has climate change impacted the current infestation? And how will it impact future population explosions?
气候变化对此次鼠灾造成了哪些影响？将来又会产生哪些影响？
Through the past decade or so, there’s been a very severe drought in Australia. The mouse population pretty much disappeared, and people thought, “Oh, no more mouse problems!” And that did have a knock-on impact into research and development because a lot of people said, “Oh, we don’t need all these mouse experts anymore.” Funding to that area of research kind of dried up. And so there has been a sort of “Okay, now we’ve got a problem again....” And there is no easy solution.
在过去十年左右的时间里，澳大利亚发生了非常严重的干旱。老鼠的数量急剧减少，人们想当然地认为：“哦，老鼠的问题不会再有了！”这确实对灭鼠的研发产生了连锁反应，因为很多人说，“哦，我们不再需要灭鼠专家了。”该研究领域的资金几乎枯竭。而如今鼠灾再度爆发时，又有一种“好吧，现在这个问题又来了......”的困苦，然而这次解决起来就困难重重了。
注释：
knock-on：使产生连锁反应的;
[例句]The increase in the price of oil had a knock-on effect on the cost of many other goods. 石油价格上涨对其他许多商品的价格引起了连锁反应。
Are these outbreaks something that we just have to live with? Are they going to become more frequent? You could argue that with climate change, Australia is going to become much more of a drought-stricken country. Or perhaps these rainfall events are going to just be coming through much more severely, which would then drive the outbreaks to become more frequent.
我们无法摆脱鼠灾困扰了吗？鼠灾会变得更频繁吗？你可能会把这些归咎于气候变化，澳大利亚将变得更加干旱。或者，大范围降雨可能会变得更加严重，从而导致鼠灾变得更加频繁。
Is there a way to stop these periodic rodent outbreaks?
有没有办法阻止这些周期性的鼠灾爆发？
In Australia, if they stopped producing wheat throughout the wheat belt, there’d be no more outbreaks. But if you’re going to try to convince the Australian government to do that, everyone will just laugh at you. Growing food is much more important. You could easily think of ways of taking the food away from the rodents, but then we need the food, too.
在澳大利亚，如果停止在整个小麦种植带生产小麦，就不会再有鼠灾爆发。但如果你想说服澳大利亚政府 这样做，只会被所有人嘲笑。种植作物当然更为重要。让啮齿类动物断粮的方法很容易想到，但我们也需要食物。
We can think about ways of growing crops much more synchronously. Asynchronous planting exacerbates problems. In Australia, I think, not all the wheat is necessarily grown at the same time. You could try to coordinate that a little bit better. But again, economics comes into this. When everything is synchronous, it may be good biologically, but economically, it means you need all your tractors ready at the same time to do the harvesting. Would it be economically viable? Probably not. Otherwise, we’d probably already be doing it.
我们可以考虑更同步地种植作物的方法。异步种植会加剧鼠灾问题。我认为，在澳大利亚，并非所有的小麦都必须同时种植。你可以尝试更好地协调它。但同样，这又涉及到了经济学问题。当一切都同步时，在生物学上可能是好的，但在经济上，这意味着需要同时准备好所有拖拉机以进行收割。同步种植在经济上可行吗？可能不会。否则，我们可能已经在这样做了。
Synchronously：同步; 同步地; 同步执行; 同步模式
[例句]This processing sequence is done synchronously and in real time.
此处理序列将以同步的方式实时完成。
