Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, has been trying to answer a dismal question: Is everything terrible, or are things just very, very bad?

加州大学戴维斯分校的生态学家切尔西·罗克曼曾试图回答一个非常沉闷的问题:是一切都很糟糕还是事情变得非常差?

Rochman is a member of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis's marine-debris working group, a collection of scientists who study, among other things, the growing problem of marine debris, also known as ocean trash. Plenty of studies have sounded alarm bells about the state of marine debris; in a recent paper published in the journal Ecology, Rochman and her colleagues set out to determine how many of those perceived risks are real.

罗克曼是美国国家生态分析与合成中心海洋垃圾工作组的成员之一，该工作组由一群研究海洋垃圾问题的科学家组成。大量的研究为海洋垃圾的状况敲响了警钟;在最近发表在《生态学》杂志上的一篇论文中，罗克曼和她的同事们开始着手确定这些感知到的风险中有多少是真实存在的。

Often, Rochman says，scientists will end a paper by speculating about the broader impacts of what they've found. For example, a study could show that certain seabirds eat plastic bags, and go on to warn that whole bird populations are at risk of dying out. 'But the truth was that nobody had yet tested those perceived threats,' Rochman says. 'There wasn't a lot of information.'

罗克曼说，科学家们通常会在论文的结尾对他们所发现的更广泛的影响进行推测。例如，一项研究表明，某些海鸟会吃塑料袋，他们便会继续警告说，整个鸟类种群正面临灭绝的危险。但罗克曼说:“事实是，还没有人测试过这些感知到的威胁。我们并没有充分的信息。

Rochman and her colleagues examined more than a hundred papers on the impacts of marine debris that were published through 2013. Within each paper, they asked what threats scientists had studied - 366 perceived threats in all - and what they'd actually found.

罗克曼和她的同事研究了2013年发表的一百多篇关于海洋垃圾影响的论文。在每篇论文中，他们询问了科学家们研究了哪些威胁--总共366个感知到的威胁--以及他们的实际发现。

In 83 percent of cases, the perceived dangers of ocean trash were proven true. In the remaining cases, the working group found the studies had weaknesses in design and content which affected the validity of their conclusions-they lacked a control group, for example, or used faulty statistics.

在83%的案例中，海洋垃圾的危险被证明是真实的。在其余的案例中，工作组发现这些研究在设计和内容上存在缺陷，从而影响了其结论的有效性--例如，它们缺少一个对照组，或者使用了错误的统计数据。

Strikingly, Rochman says, only one well-designed study failed to find the effect it was looking for, an investigation of mussels ingesting microscopic plastic bits. The plastic moved from the Mussels' stomachs to their bloodstreams, scientists found, and stayed there for weeks - but didn't seem to stress out the shellfish.

罗克曼说，令人震惊的是，只有一项设计精良的研究未能发现其所要寻找的结果，那就是对贻贝误食微小塑料碎片的调查。科学家们发现，塑料从始贝的胃部转移到它们的血液中，并在那里停留了数周，但似乎并没有对贝类动物产生任何损伤。

While mussels may be fine eating trash, though, the analysis also gave a clearer picture of the many ways that ocean debris is bothersome.

虽然贻贝可以很好地应对误食垃圾，但这项分析也让我们更清楚地认识到，海洋垃圾在很多方面都很恼人。

Within the studies they looked at, most of the proven threats came from plastic debris, rather than other materials like metal or wood. Most of the dangers also involved large pieces of debris - animals getting entangled in trash, for example, or eating it and severely injuring themselves.

在他们的研究中，大多数已被证实的威胁来自塑料碎片，而不是金属或木材等其他材料。绝大多数的危险还包括大块的残骸--例如，动物们被垃圾缠住，又或者因为误食垃圾而受到了严重的伤害。

But a lot of ocean debris is 'microplastic', or pieces smaller than five millimeters. These may be ingredients used in cosmetics and toiletries, fibers shed by synthetic clothing in the wash, or eroded remnants of larger debris. Compared to the number of studies investigating large-scale debris, Rochman's group found little research on the effects of these tiny bits. 'There are a lot of open questions still for microplastic', Rochman says, though she notes that more papers on the subject have been published since 2013, the cutoff point for the group's analysis.

但许多海洋碎片是“微塑料”，或小于5毫米的碎片。这些可能是化妆品和盥洗用品的成分，洗涤合成衣服时脱落的纤维，或者是大型残骸的侵蚀碎片。与调查大规模碎片的研究数量相比，罗克曼的工作组发现关于这些小碎片影响的研究很少。罗克曼说:“关于微塑料还有很多尚未解决的问题。“尽管她指出，自2013年以来，更多关于这个主题的论文已经发表，但这只是这个团队分析的分界点。

There are also, she adds, a lot of open questions about the ways that ocean debris can lead to sea-creature death. Many studies have looked at how plastic affects an individual animal, or that animal's tissues or cells, rather than whole populations. And in the lab, scientists often use higher concentrations of plastic than what's really in the ocean. None of that tells us how many birds or fish or sea turtles could die from plastic pollution — or how deaths in one species could affect that animal's predators, or the rest of the ecosystem.

她补充说，还有很多关于海洋碎片如何导致海洋生物死亡相关的有待解决的问题。许多研究关注的是塑料如何影响单个动物，或如何影响动物的组织或细胞，而不是整个种群。在实验室里，科学家们经常使用比海洋中浓度更高的塑料。但这些都不能真正告诉我们有多少鸟类、鱼类或海龟会死于塑料污染，或者一个物种的死亡会如何影响该物种的捕食者，以及生态系统的其他部分。

'We need to be asking more ecologically relevant questions,' Rochman says. Usually, scientists don't know exactly how disasters such as a tanker accidentally spilling its whole cargo of oil and polluting huge areas of the ocean will affect the environment until after they've happened. 'We don't ask the right questions early enough,' she says. But if ecologists can understand how the slow-moving effect of ocean trash is damaging ecosystems, they might be able to prevent things from getting worse.

“我们需要提出更多与生态相关的问题。“罗克曼说。通常情况下，直到灾难发生之前，科学家们都不会知道诸如油轮不小心把整船的石油弄酒了，大面积受污染的海洋是如何影响了环境的。我们没有足够早地提出正确的问题。但是，如果生态学家能够理解海洋垃圾缓慢移动造成的影响是如何破坏生态系统的，他们或许就能够阻止事情变得更糟。

Asking the right questions can help policy makers, and the public, figure out where to focus their attention. The problems that look or sound most dramatic may not be the best places to start. For example, the name of the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' — a collection of marine debris in the northern Pacific Ocean—might conjure up a vast, floating trash island. In reality though, much of the debris is tiny or below the surface; a person could sail through the area without seeing any trash at all. A Dutch group called 'The Ocean Cleanup' is currently working on plans to put mechanical devices in the Pacific Garbage Patch and similar areas to suck up plastic. But a recent paper used simulations to show that strategically positioning the cleanup devices closer to shore would more effectively reduce pollution over the long term.

提出正确的问题可以帮助决策者和公众了解他们关注的焦点。那些看起来或听起来最戏剧化的问题可能不是最佳研究的切入点。例如，“大太平洋垃圾带“的名字--北太平洋的海洋垃圾收集--可能会让人联想起一座巨大的漂浮垃圾的岛屿。但实际上，大部分碎片很小，或者在地表以下;一个人可以在这片区域航行而不看到任何垃圾。一个名为“海洋清理“的荷兰组织目前正计划在太平洋垃圾带和类似地带放置机械设备来吸收塑料。但最近的一篇论文通过模拟实验表明，从长远来看，将清洁设备放置在离海岸更近的地方能够更有效地减少污染。

'I think clearing up some of these misperceptions is really important', Rochman says. Among scientists as well as in the media, she says, 'A lot of the images about strandings and entanglement and all of that cause the perception that plastic debris is killing everything in the ocean.' Interrogating the existing scientific literature can help ecologists figure out which problems really need addressing, and which ones they'd be better off—like the mussels—absorbing and ignoring.

罗克曼说:“我认为消除一些误解是非常重要的。科学家和媒体都认为，许多关于搁浅和缠结的图片都让人们认为塑料碎片正在杀死海洋中的一切。“查询现有的科学文献可以帮助生态学家找出哪些问题是真正需要解决的，哪些问题是最好得到解决的--比如贻贝，就可以吸取经验，忽略这一问题。