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Most supermarket eggs look pretty boring. 大多数超市里的鸡蛋看起来都很无趣。 Plain white chicken eggs; brown ones if you're lucky. However: 都是白鸡蛋;如果幸运的话，你会看到棕色的鸡蛋。然而 "There's a couple breeds that have blue eggs. And you can buy them at Whole Foods, actually." “有一些品种的鸡蛋是蓝色的。实际上，你可以在全食超市买到这些蛋。” Daniel Hanley, an evolutionary ecologist at Long Island University who has a very specific reason for caring about the color of his eggs. 丹尼尔.汉利是长岛大学的进化生态学家，他有一个非常特殊的理由去关注蛋类的颜色。 "I'm always thinking about eggs. It's one of the tools I use to understand ecological and evolutionary processes. So I study the function and evolution of natural colors. And the main system I use are birds eggs." “我一直在思考蛋类， 它们是我用来理解生态和进化过程的工具之一。所以，我研究自然颜色的功能和进化,使用的主要工具是鸟蛋。” Unlike white supermarket eggs, most bird eggs are colored various shades of bluish-green or brown due to two characteristic pigments birds produce. 与超市里卖的白色鸡蛋不同，因为鸟类分泌的两种特殊色素，大多数鸟蛋的颜色各异，有蓝绿色或棕色。 And by examining the egg colors of 634 species from around the world, Hanley and his colleagues found a curious pattern. 通过研究世界各地634个物种的鸟蛋颜色，汉利和他的同事们发现了一个奇特的模式。 "In the northern climates, where it's the coolest, eggs are darker and browner. “在气候严寒的北方，鸟蛋的颜色更深，更黑。 And those colors should give some type of adaptive benefit to those parents to be off of their eggs for a slightly longer period of time." 而这些颜色应该会给“准父母”带来一些适 应性的好处,让它们离开蛋的时间稍微长一些。” Darker eggs, in theory, would absorb more of the scarce sunlight in the Arctic, keeping the eggs warmer and allowing their parents to spend more time away from the nest, looking for food. 理论_上，深色的蛋会吸收更多北极地区稀少的阳光，让其保持温暖，父母因此有更多时间离开鸟巢去寻找食物。 And indeed, when Hanley's team left 66 differently colored duck, quail and chicken eggs in the sun, they found that the darker the eggs, the more slowly they lost their heat. 事实上，当汉利的团队将66个不同颜色的鸭蛋、鹌鹑蛋和鸡蛋放在阳光下时，他们发现蛋的颜色越深，热量流失得越慢。 The details and a world map of egg colors are in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. 研究的详细内容和全球鸟蛋类颜色的地图发表于《自然生态与进化》杂志。 And if you' re wondering then "Are dark brown chicken eggs from some ancestral arctic chicken?" 如果你想知道“古代北极的鸡下的蛋是否为深棕色?” "No, no, no, no." “不，不，不,不。” They just come from a different breed of hen. 它们只是来自不同品种的母鸡。 One that maybe prefers to buck the trend. 一类可能更愿意逆潮流而动的鸡。 |
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