Modelling the extinction of Steller's sea cowS.T Turvey1,* and C.L Risley2
Biology Letter
机经原文“另一篇需要在草稿纸上画关系图的阅读：某岛上的sea cow(神马玩意：海牛)在短短十来年间灭绝了，这是难以仅仅用人类的捕猎来解释的。其实呢，是这样的：人类在捕杀sea cow的同时也在捕杀另一种玩意，这种玩意的主食是U开头的一个玩意sea urchin 海胆。U这些玩意因此得以坐大，吃掉了很多的otter(又是神马：水獭)。Otter可是咱们的sea cow的主食呀，被U们吃光了，亲们就不得不加速灭绝了。"(机经原文错成这样了……海牛吃水獭，太恐怖了)
先把abstract放上来(看完就基本搞定文章大意了)：
Steller’s sea cow, a giant sirenian discovered in 1741 and extinct by 1768, is one of the few megafaunal mammal species to have died out during the historical period. The species is traditionally considered to have been exterminated by ‘blitzkrieg’-style direct overharvesting for food, but it has also been proposed that its extinction resulted from a sea urchin population explosion(海胆增多) triggered by extirpation of local sea otter populations(海獭灭绝) that eliminated the shallow water kelps(浅水褐藻灭绝) on which sea cows fed. Hunting records from eighteenth century Russian expeditions to the Commander Islands, in conjunction with life-history data extrapolated from dugongs(儒艮), permit modelling of sea cow extinction dynamics. (用记录model海牛灭绝的过程)Sea cows were massively and wastefully overexploited, being hunted at over seven times the sustainable limit, and suggesting that the initial Bering Island sea cow population must have been higher than suggested by previous researchers to allow the species to survive even until 1768.(作者认为是捕猎导致灭绝的) Environmental changes caused by sea otter declines are unlikely to have contributed to this extinction event.(作者不同意食物链说) This indicates that megafaunal extinctions can be effected by small bands of hunters using pre-industrial technologies, and highlights the catastrophic impact of wastefulness when overexploiting resources mistakenly perceived as ‘infinite’(作者认为：灭绝可以由一小群捕猎者导致，浪费(即过度捕杀原本以为是无尽的资源)会带来灾难性的后果).
