|
One man, a passionate ornithologist called Derek Ratcliffe started to investigate. He focused on the collapse in the peregrine falcon population and, in 1966, his detective work brought him to these very trays here in the Natural History Museum. Hi, how are you doing? Hello. Today the curator of the egg collections is Douglas Russell. He came to the Natural History Museum and he began to look at what the eggs looked like and their dimensions and eggshell thickness and all the parameters around the eggs in the period before DDT was released. And that' s what this series allowed him to do. Ratcliffe spent hours alone, studying these eggs that predated the use of DDT. His initial study just came in and started to weigh eggshells, so that he would begin to take out an eggshell, work out what the weight of that particular shell was and then take shells which he was collecting from the wild at that point, as part of the peregrine studies and suddenly realised, gosh, this shell is significantly lighter than shells that were being laid 30 years ago. |
|
yī wèi chōng mǎn jī qíng de niǎo lèi xué jiā, dé lǐ kè léi kè lǐ fū zhǎn kāi le diào chá. tā zhǔ yào yán jiū yī zhǒng shù liàng jí jù jiǎn shǎo de yóu sǔn, 1966 nián tā de zhēn chá gōng zuò yǐn lǐng tā lái dào le zì rán shǐ bó wù guǎn. nǐ hǎo nǐ hǎo zhè shì dàn lèi shōu cáng pǐn guǎn lǐ yuán, dào gé lā sī luó sù. tā lái dào zì rán shǐ bó wù guǎn, kāi shǐ guān chá dàn de wài guān, chǐ cùn yǐ jí dàn ké de hòu dù, zhèi xiē dàn de zī liào dōu shì zài dī dī tì wū rǎn qián shōu jí de, tā de gōng zuò jiù yóu cǐ zhǎn kāi. léi kè lǐ fū dú zì gōng zuò le jǐ gè xiǎo shí, yán jiū dī dī tì shǐ yòng qián de qín dàn. yán jiū yī kāi shǐ, tā xiān gěi dàn ké chēng zhòng, ná chū yí gè dàn ké, jì suàn chū zhè zhǒng tè shū dàn ké de zhòng liàng, rán hòu zài ná chū tā zài yě wài shōu jí de yóu sǔn dàn, jiāng dàn ké chēng zhòng bìng bǐ jiào. rán hòu tā tū rán fā xiàn, zhè gè bǐ 30 nián qián de dàn ké yào míng xiǎn qīng hěn duō. |