万物简史 第528期:丰富多彩的生命(24)

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In practical terms, this is not always a bad thing. 实际上，这不总是一件坏事。

You might not slumber¹ quite so contentedly² if you were aware that your mattress³ is home to perhaps two million microscopic⁴ mites⁶, 要是你知道你的床垫是大约200万个只有在显微镜下才看得见的螨虫的家园，

which come out in the wee hours to sup on your sebaceous oils and feast on all those lovely, crunchy flakes⁷ of skin that you shed as you doze⁸ and toss. 它们在凌晨一两点钟钻出来，一小口一小口地喝着你的皮脂，美美地吃着你在打盹儿或翻身时掉下来的又香又脆的皮屑，你也许不会睡得那么香。

Your pillow alone may be home to forty thousand of them. 光你的枕头上就可能生活着4万个微生物。

(To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon.) （对于它们来说，你的头只是一块油汪汪的大软糖。）

And don't think a clean pillowcase will make a difference. 别以为换了个干净枕套会起什么作用。

To something on the scale of bed mites, the weave of the tightest human fabric⁹ looks like ship's rigging. 在床上螨虫大小的东西看来，人类织得再紧密的物品看上去也只是像船上的索具。

Indeed, if your pillow is six years old — which is apparently¹⁰ about the average age for a pillow, 要是你的枕头已经用了六年——这显然大约是一个枕头的平均寿命，

it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of "sloughed¹¹ skin, living mites, dead mites and mite⁵ dung," 据估计，用一位计算过的人的话来说，它十分之一的分量来自“脱下来的皮屑、活的螨虫、死的螨虫和螨虫的屎”。

to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Center. 那个人是英国医学昆虫学中心的约翰·蒙德博士。

(But at least they areyour mites. Think of what you snuggle up with each time you climb into a motel bed.) （但是，至少它们是你身上的螨虫。想像一下，每次你爬进一家旅馆的床铺，你会跟什么依偎而睡。）

These mites have been with us since time immemorial, but they weren't discovered until 1965. 这些螨虫自古以来就和我们在一起，但是直到1965年才被发现。

We are actually getting worse at some matters of hygiene¹². 实际上，我们的有些卫生条件越来越差。

Dr. Maunder believes that the move toward low-temperature washing machine detergents¹³ has encouraged bugs¹⁴ to proliferate¹⁵. 蒙德博士认为，使用低温洗衣机洗涤剂的趋势，已经鼓励了虫子的繁殖。

As he puts it: "If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice." 他指出：“要是在低温下洗脏衣服，你得到的是比较干净的虱子。”

If creatures as intimately associated with us as bed mites escaped our notice until the age of color television, 要是像床里的螨虫这样的与我们关系密切的动物直到彩色电视时代才引起我们的注意，

it's hardly surprising that most of the rest of the small-scale world is barely known to us. 我们对大多数别的小生物几乎不了解，这是不足为怪的。

 

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