它在海底消失了十年，科学家们一直在寻找这只"海中大脚怪"

一、标题导读

二、原文与参考译文

When over 99 percent of California's sunflower sea stars mysteriously wasted away 10 years ago, an already stressed ecosystem unraveled.

Sunflower sea stars—Pycnopodia helianthoides—may look like a purely decorative feature of the ocean floor, but they're voracious predators. As adults, they can grow up to 24 arms, span three feet wide, and move three feet per minute. They are superlative, and alien—one of the largest and arguably most ravenous sea stars in the world.

But at the end of 2013, a colossal marine heatwave swept over the north east Pacific just as a mysterious underwater epidemic began causing sea stars to die off en masse. Without a primary predator, an excess of purple sea urchins insatiably consumed their surrounding kelp forests.

By 2017, this sudden explosion of hungry sea urchins and an ongoing marine heat wave, strengthened by an El Niño weather pattern, wiped out more than 90 percent of kelp forests in some West Coast regions. Kelp forests on the West Coast are critical habitats that support dozens of species, from drifting plankton to migrating gray whales. They're also a vital habitat to lucrative fish species like rockfish, abalone, and crabs.

Sunflower sea stars, these crucial members of the ecosystem, became almost mythological, earning them the affectionate term "seasquatch" among many professional and amateur scientific sleuths. Finally, after years of faithful searching, a hidden "seasquatch" lair was discovered last June.

"The moment I saw my first sunflower star underwater, I was so excited that I literally screamed through my regulator," Rachael Karm, a research technician at Sonoma State University's Dr. Brent Hughes ecology and conservation lab, noted in an email. "I came up to the surface before remembering to even take a photo."

Just two months later, Karm convened an event dubbed Pycnopalooza. Once Pycnopalooza was announced, it drew a dream team of 25 scientific divers from eight different institutions: The Nature Conservancy; Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary; Moss Landing Marine Labs; University of California, Berkeley; Reef Check California; Sonoma State University; Sunflower Star Laboratory; and the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, whose scientific dive team oversees kelp restoration on their ancestral lands.

By the end of the two-day effort, 18 adult sunflower sea stars had been found—each individual marked by its own exuberantly bobbing red buoy. Just weeks before the August dive took place in California, scientists at the Hakai Institute in British Columbia published a paper that finally identified the culprit behind the sea star mass mortality—the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida.

"It's special to know these stars exist, and maybe they're special in a few more ways that can help us understand their hopeful return," said Lauren Schiebelhut, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of California, Merced. Scientists and tribal leaders are hopeful that this sea star population can recover, but they still face hurdles. At the same time scientists were finding healthy sunflower sea stars last August, one was also found wasting away, right next to its seemingly healthy neighbors.

"The first Pycnopalooza showed us how much we can accomplish when we all come together," said Karm. "I'm looking forward to more paloozas up and down the coast of California to see where else sunflower stars may still be hiding."

三、核心词汇

四、长难句语法拆解

句一

By 2017, this sudden explosion of hungry sea urchins and an ongoing marine heat wave, strengthened by an El Niño weather pattern, wiped out more than 90 percent of kelp forests in some West Coast regions.

• S（主语）：this sudden explosion of hungry sea urchins and an ongoing marine heat wave → 并列主语，由 and 连接两个名词短语：「饥饿海胆的突然爆发」+「持续的海洋热浪」
• V（谓语）：wiped out（消灭；抹去）
• O（宾语）：more than 90 percent of kelp forests in some West Coast regions

• strengthened by an El Niño weather pattern 是过去分词短语，作后置定语修饰 an ongoing marine heat wave，说明热浪被厄尔尼诺加剧——即被动含义（= which was strengthened by El Niño）。
• 这类「名词 + 过去分词短语」的后置结构在英语学术文章中极为常见，等同于非限制性定语从句，翻译时可前置为「被……加强的热浪」，也可拆句处理。

句二

Once Pycnopalooza was announced, it drew a dream team of 25 scientific divers from eight different institutions: The Nature Conservancy; Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary; ...; and the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, whose scientific dive team oversees kelp restoration on their ancestral lands.

• 状语从句：Once Pycnopalooza was announced（一旦……被宣布） → 时间状语从句，once 引导，表示「一经宣布」；内部用被动语态
• S（主语）：it（指代 Pycnopalooza 活动）
• V（谓语）：drew（吸引）
• O（宾语）：a dream team of 25 scientific divers from eight different institutions → 后接冒号 + 分号列举，清晰列出八家机构名称

• whose scientific dive team oversees kelp restoration on their ancestral lands → 非限制性关系从句，whose 指代 Kashia Band of Pomo Indians（卡夏波莫印第安人部落），补充说明该部落在祖先领地上有自己的科学潜水队参与海带复育工作