2025-12-05 20:00:00
北美最小的隼类——美国游隼，全天候地帮助一些樱桃园控制害虫。如果你有幸在这个节日吃到一块温暖的樱桃派，你应该感谢这种鸟。它是美国游隼，体型大约和蓝松鸦相当，是北美最小的隼类。在密歇根州——美国的酸樱桃生产中心，这种鸟帮助农民种植樱桃。
关键要点
游隼是捕食者，它们捕食昆虫、啮齿动物和其他鸟类，而这些鸟类常常吃樱桃。因此，当樱桃园安装游隼巢箱时，农民会发现较少的樱桃食鸟，如知更鸟和乌鸫。一项2018年的研究显示，每投入一美元安装巢箱，农民就能节省多达357美元的樱桃损失。如果游隼入住，果园中的害鸟就会减少，因为这些小隼会吃掉害鸟或吓跑它们。
最近，科学家发表了一项新研究，进一步明确了游隼对果园的好处。研究显示，有游隼入住的果园比没有游隼的果园受到的损害更小，樱桃被吃或部分被吃的情况也更少。研究还发现，有游隼的果园中鸟类排泄物更少。这很重要，因为鸟类粪便可能携带病原体，如弯曲杆菌，这种细菌可能导致人类食物中毒。
这项新研究是越来越多关于保护野生捕食者如何造福人类的研究之一。狼群可以减少汽车事故，因为它们阻止了鹿靠近公路；海獭保护海藻林，从而支持沿海渔业；而游隼这种在美国大部分地区数量正在下降的捕食者，可以帮助控制农田害虫。它们只需要一个栖息地。
生态学家通过收集鸟粪获得的发现
科学家们早在十多年前就在樱桃园中安装了高架巢箱，以研究游隼对密歇根樱桃种植者的影响。这些巢箱常常吸引游隼，因为它们喜欢在树洞中筑巢。根据密歇根州立大学的退休副教授凯瑟琳·林德尔的说法，安装巢箱后，研究人员比较了有游隼和没有游隼的果园，发现当游隼存在时，害鸟数量减少。他们于2018年发表了一篇具有里程碑意义的论文，引起了广泛关注。
农民很难控制吃樱桃的鸟类，他们通常不能像控制昆虫那样用毒药。其他方法，如用网覆盖作物，成本很高。游隼巢箱成本约115美元（2018年数据），是一种经济实惠的替代方案。2018年的论文证明了这种方法的有效性。
最新的研究则采用了更为“令人作呕”的方法：由密歇根州立大学的奥利维亚·史密斯领导的团队收集了有游隼巢箱和没有游隼巢箱的果园中的鸟粪，并送往实验室检测其中是否含有弯曲杆菌。研究发现，没有游隼的果园中鸟粪更多。史密斯解释说，这是因为没有游隼的果园中害鸟更多，它们在偷吃樱桃时会留下粪便。
研究还发现，一些鸟粪中含有弯曲杆菌，这可能导致人类腹泻。但这并不意味着这些果园的樱桃总是危险的——弯曲杆菌在空气中存活时间不长，而且农民不会采摘带有粪便的果实。此外，樱桃在出售前也会被清洗。不过，这项研究确实表明，游隼可能在采摘前减少樱桃上的细菌，从而降低污染风险。
默默无闻的农场劳动者
美国游隼并不是唯一帮助我们生产食物的野生捕食者。自2005年起，科学家们在新西兰将濒危的游隼迁移到葡萄酒种植园，这些地方有大量入侵性鸟类，如乌鸫和黑鸟，它们会吃葡萄。后续研究显示，引入游隼后，果园中的害鸟数量减少，葡萄损失减少了95%。
对游隼友好的葡萄酒？
美国一些葡萄酒庄也依赖游隼，包括美国游隼，来控制害虫。例如，密歇根州的“Chateau Grand Traverse”酒庄已经安装了三个（即将安装第四个）游隼巢箱，酒庄老板爱迪·奥基夫告诉《vox》：“拥有一个能真正起作用的自然捕食者，感觉很酷。”他说，游隼不仅控制老鼠和田鼠，还能吓跑其他可能造成问题的鸟类，这是一种几乎不费力的预防措施。
与此同时，全球各地的农民多年来一直依赖猫头鹰来控制吃作物的啮齿动物，如老鼠和沙鼠。例如，在以色列，农民通过安装数千个猫头鹰巢箱，作为替代杀鼠剂的手段，从而减少了对人类和本地野生动物有害的杀鼠剂使用。近年来，随着越来越多的农民使用吸引猫头鹰的巢箱，以色列的杀鼠剂使用量下降了45%。
鸟类在不同农场中扮演的角色各不相同，但总体而言，让捕食性鸟类在农田中栖息，有助于提高作物产量。2021年的一项分析指出，排除野生鸟类会显著增加作物损失，因此建议将野生鸟类视为有效的生物防治手段。
然而，最令人印象深刻的例子是蝙蝠。大多数北美蝙蝠以昆虫为食，包括农田中的害虫，如蛾类和甲虫。研究表明，随着蝙蝠数量因“白鼻综合征”等疾病而急剧下降，农民不得不使用更多农药，以弥补蝙蝠减少带来的害虫控制缺失。这导致农民种植同样多的作物需要花费更多金钱，并且向环境中排放更多可能危害人类健康的化学物质。
一项去年发表的惊人研究甚至将蝙蝠数量下降与婴儿死亡率上升联系起来。密苏里西部州立大学的生物学家和鸟类专家朱莉·杰德利卡说：“大自然为人类提供了这些服务，而且是免费的。”她表示，问题是：“我们如何利用这些服务？”
讽刺的是，农田是野生动物和自然生态系统的主要杀手。农业行业整体上导致了捕食性鸟类，包括游隼的数量下降，因为农田取代了自然栖息地，而农药又杀死了它们的猎物。这些研究显示，恢复一些自然景观特征，如鸟类捕食者，对农民有益，也对那些享受他们劳动成果的人有益。
If you’re lucky enough to enjoy a warm slice of cherry pie this holiday, you should probably thank this bird.
It’s an American kestrel, the smallest falcon in North America, which is roughly the size of a blue jay. And in some parts of Michigan — the nation’s tart cherry capital — this bird helps farmers produce cherries.
Kestrels are predators, and they prey on insects, rodents, and other birds, many of which eat cherries. So when cherry farmers have kestrel nest boxes in their orchards, they see fewer cherry-eating birds, such as robins and grackles, as one 2018 study revealed. According to that study, farmers can save as much as $357 worth of cherries for every dollar they spend on installing nest boxes, which are essentially elevated wooden birdhouses. If kestrels move in, orchards have fewer bird pests, since the fierce little falcons eat them or scare the pests away.
Now, scientists have published another study that makes the benefits of the raptors even clearer.
It shows that orchards with occupied nest boxes have less damage — less eaten or partially eaten cherries — than those without kestrels. The authors also found that cherry orchards with kestrels had less bird poop.
That’s key, because avian excrement can carry pathogens, such as Campylobacter, a type of bacteria that can give people food poisoning.
The new study is part of a growing body of research on how conserving wild predators benefits humans. Wolves can limit car accidents by keeping deer away from roads. Sea otters safeguard kelp forests that, in turn, support coastal fisheries, by consuming urchins. And falcons — which are in decline throughout much of the US, for reasons that are still unclear — help curb farm pests. They just need a place to live.
Scientists first figured out that American kestrels are good for Michigan cherry growers by installing elevated nest boxes in orchards more than a decade ago. Those boxes often attract kestrels because the birds like to nest in cavities, according to Catherine Lindell, an associate professor emerita at Michigan State University, who has spent 15 years studying falcons in cherry orchards. After installing the boxes, the researchers compared orchards with and without kestrels, finding that there are fewer pest birds — species that eat cherries — when kestrels are present.
They published their results in a seminal 2018 paper, and it was a big deal. Farmers have a tough time managing fruit-eating birds. They typically can’t poison them, the way they control insects. And other measures, like covering crops with nets, are far more expensive. Kestrel nest boxes cost about $115, including installation (as of 2018), making them a cheap alternative. And the 2018 paper proved that they work.
The new study, published in late November, goes a step further, relying on methods that are, you might say, disgusting.
Scientists led by Michigan State University researcher Olivia Smith collected bird poop in orchards with active kestrel nest boxes, and in those without. They then shipped the poop to a lab to test it for Campylobacter, the leading cause of bacterial food-borne illness globally.
Smith and her coauthors ultimately found more poop on branches in orchards without kestrels. The logic here is that avian pests are more common in kestrel-free orchards, and they defecate while raiding the cherries, Smith said.
The study also revealed that some of the poop contained Campylobacter, which can cause diarrhea in humans. That doesn’t mean that cherries from those orchards are always dangerous — Campylobacter doesn’t survive long in the open air, and farmers are not supposed to harvest fruits with feces on them. Plus, the cherries are, of course, cleaned before they’re sold. But the study does suggest that kestrels may at least lower the amount of bacteria on cherries before they’re harvested, and thus lower the small risk that dirty orchards pose to consumers.
“If you [a farmer] can get kestrels nesting, it’s a big benefit,” Lindell, who was involved in the new study, said.
American kestrels aren’t the only wild predators helping produce our food. Starting in 2005, scientists relocated threatened falcons in New Zealand to wine vineyards that have a number of invasive avian pests, including blackbirds and song thrushes. Those invasive birds eat grapes. Subsequent research on the project, known as Falcons for Grapes, linked the introduction of falcons to a decrease in pest birds and a “95 percent reduction in the number of grapes removed relative to vineyards without falcons.”
A number of US wineries also rely on falcons, including American kestrels, for pest control. A winery in Michigan called Chateau Grand Traverse, for example, has installed three (and soon-to-be four) kestrel nest boxes, winery owner and president Eddie O’Keefe told Vox.
“It’s kind of cool to have a natural predator out there that actually does work,” O’Keefe said. “They take care of the mice, the voles, and in addition, they also keep other birds that could be a problem in flight, because they’re afraid. It’s just a good preventative measure that really doesn’t take much effort.”
Meanwhile, farmers around the world have for decades been relying on barn owls to control rats, pocket gophers, and other rodent pests that eat crops. Through a program in Israel, for example, farmers have installed thousands of owl nest boxes as an alternative to rodent-killing chemicals that can harm people and native wildlife. In recent years, as more and more farmers started using owl-attracting nest boxes, the use of rodenticide in Israel has plunged by 45 percent.
The role of birds varies from farm to farm, but broadly speaking, having predatory birds on the landscape — those that eat other animals, including insects and rodents — benefits crop production. “Overall, we found that excluding wild birds significantly increased crop damage,” authors of a 2021 analysis of 55 existing studies wrote. “We recommend that wild birds be considered as effective biological control agents.”
But if there’s one example that’s most impressive of all, it’s bats.
Most bat species in North America eat insects, including farm pests like moths and beetles. And research has shown that as bat populations plummet — as they have, largely from a disease called white nose syndrome — farmers use more pesticides, presumably because bats aren’t there to eat pests. That means farmers spend more money growing the same amount of food, and they put more chemicals into the environment that can harm human health. A remarkable study published last year even linked the decline of bats to a rise in infant mortality.
“Nature is providing these services for humans for free,” said Julie Jedlicka, a biologist and bird expert at Missouri Western State University, who was not involved in the research. The question, she said, is, “How can we take advantage of that?”
The irony, of course, is that farmland is the leading killer of wildlife and natural ecosystems. In fact, the agricultural sector, broadly, has contributed to the decline of predatory birds, including kestrels, as farmland has replaced natural habitat and pesticides have killed off their prey. What these studies show is that bringing back at least some natural features of the landscape, such as avian predators, can be good for farmers — and those of us who indulge in the literal fruits of their labor.
2025-12-05 19:30:00
根据新发布的《全球健康指标与评估研究所》（IHME）预测，今年有约480万五岁以下儿童死亡。这一数字比上一年增加了20万，是本世纪以来首次出现五岁以下儿童死亡人数上升的情况。这主要是由于美国和欧洲大部分国家大幅削减对外援助，这一政策变化对全球儿童的影响比艾滋病大流行更为严重。据IHME数据显示，全球卫生发展援助资金今年骤降近27%。如果未来二十年援助资金减少20%，到2045年，将有1200万更多五岁以下儿童死亡；若减少幅度达到30%，则可能增加1600万死亡案例，相当于荷兰的人口或美国四倍的幼儿园儿童数量。比尔·盖茨在本周发布的新报告中写道：“这意味着有超过5000个教室的孩子，还没学会写字或系鞋带就夭折了。”
尽管自1990年以来，五岁以下儿童死亡率下降了60%以上，但在像索马里、南苏丹和乍得这样的极度贫困国家，仍有约十分之一的儿童在五岁前夭折。而援助资金的削减使这些严峻的形势更加恶化。当资源减少时，往往首先影响社会中最脆弱的群体，即母亲和儿童。斯坦福大学健康政策系的博士后研究员露丝·吉布森（Ruth Gibson）表示，由于援助削减，低收入和中等收入国家在近几十年来在降低婴儿和幼儿死亡率方面取得的进展，可能有高达30%会被逆转。
不过，情况并非不可改变。如今，我们拥有比50年前甚至15年前更多保护儿童的工具和方法。例如，lenacapavir是一种每两年注射一次的抗HIV药物，有望在我们的一生中几乎消除新的感染。还有新的母体疫苗，可以在婴儿出生前预防数百万婴儿的呼吸道合胞病毒（RSV）感染。此外，还有令人瞩目的新型疟疾治疗和疫苗。
令人欣慰的是，即使在资金缺口较大的情况下，低收入和中等收入国家仍在努力取得进展。肯尼亚的社区卫生工作者约瑟芬·巴拉萨（Josephine Barasa）告诉盖茨基金会：“支持系统可能已经消失，但需求依然存在，我也没有消失。” 当他因援助削减而失去诊所的工作后，他选择无偿继续工作。这些创新不会因为少数富裕国家决定不再投资儿童生命而停止，也不会让像巴拉萨这样的医护人员停止努力。然而，对像国际疫苗联盟Gavi这样的组织的资助削减，将使这些令人鼓舞的进展难以持续，并难以惠及最需要它们的儿童。因此，他们需要资金支持。现在我们已经清楚，如果得不到资金，将会付出怎样的代价。
The world is a much better place than it used to be, especially for young children.
Insecticide-treated mosquito nets and novel treatments have made malaria much less deadly for millions of kids. Many countries now have the tools and techniques they need to nurse even very premature babies back to health. And the stupendous rise of vaccines against deadly diseases — like measles, diphtheria, and pneumonia — have prevented countless children from getting sick to begin with.
But after decades of progress in preventing child deaths, the world is now going in the wrong direction in the very worst way imaginable. According to newly released projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) done in partnership with the Gates Foundation, an estimated 4.8 million young children died before their fifth birthday this year. That would represent an increase of 200,000 from the year prior. It is the first time this century that child deaths have increased and it comes in large part as a result of massive foreign aid cuts from the United States and most of Europe, a policy change that has proved more immediately catastrophic for the world’s children than the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Global development assistance for health — which provides the mosquito nets, vaccines, and simple treatments needed to keep kids safe for a tiny fraction of rich countries’ budgets — plummeted by nearly 27 percent this year, according to the IHME.
If funding cuts of 20 percent persist over the next two decades, then 12 million more young children could die by 2045, as compared to a future where aid remains stable.
And if they continue at an even more drastic rate of 30 percent, the number of additional deaths could rise to 16 million, roughly the population of the Netherlands or four times the number of kindergarteners there are in the United States.
“That means more than 5,000 classrooms of children, gone before they ever learn to write their name or tie their shoes,” writes Bill Gates in the new report released this week.
In a worst-case scenario, he writes, “we could be the generation who had access to the most advanced science and innovation in human history — but couldn’t get the funding together to ensure it saved lives.”
The number of children dying before age 5 has plummeted by over 60 percent since 1990, but even so, in drastically poor countries like Somalia, South Sudan, and Chad, about one in 10 young children still do not make it to their fifth birthday.
And aid cuts have made those dire odds even worse. When resources dwindle, the effects often “trickle down” first upon the “most vulnerable groups within society” — starting with mothers and young children — “who will carry the burden of those restrictions,” Ruth Gibson, a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford’s department of health policy, told me earlier this year.
In a separate study published in The Lancet in May, Gibson found that up to 30 percent of the progress made in recent decades against infant and young child mortality could soon be lost in low-income and middle-income countries as a result of aid cuts.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The world now has far more tools and techniques at its disposal to keep kids safe than it did 50 or even 15 years ago. Think of lenacapavir, the biannual jab to prevent HIV that could virtually eliminate new infections in our lifetime. Or new maternal vaccines that could help prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in millions of babies before they’re even born. Or impressive new malaria treatments and vaccines.
One point of hope is that, even in the face of major funding gaps, lower and middle-income countries are still managing to eke out plenty of progress against deadly diseases.
“The support systems may have disappeared but the need has not. And neither have I,” Josephine Barasa, a community health worker in Kenya, told the Gates Foundation. When she lost her job at a clinic to aid cuts earlier this year, she returned to work unpaid.
These innovations won’t stop just because a few wealthy countries decided that saving children’s lives was no longer worth the investment. Neither will the work of health care workers like Barasa.
But funding cuts to organizations like international vaccine alliance Gavi — which until this year, received around 13 percent of its budget from the United States — will make it much harder to sustain these promising advancements and bring them to the children who need them most. For that, they’ll need money. And now we know the toll if they don’t get it.
2025-12-05 19:00:00
在哥伦比亚首都波哥大的历史城区，一座朴素的政府建筑矗立在金碧辉煌的西蒙·玻利瓦尔雕像的阴影下。建筑的第四层是一个名为“照顾区块”（manzana del cuidado）的社区中心，这里正进行着一场不同的革命。在10月一个阳光明媚的早晨，一群孩子围坐在天蓝色的桌子旁，睁大眼睛听着老师讲述万圣节故事。在另一间教室里，一群母亲和祖母正弯腰在玻璃罐和蜡烛上学习如何将废弃容器改造成蜡烛，这是由城市环境部门官员主持的回收工作坊。在主厅里，几位穿着运动鞋和运动裤的女性正跟随教练做健身操，边做边笑，伸展和跳跃着。这个空间是波哥大自2020年以来开设的25个社区中心之一，旨在应对“时间贫困”问题——即女性承担了大量无偿照顾工作，导致她们几乎没有时间做其他事情。
在波哥大这座拥有800万人口的城市中，近400万女性从事某种形式的无偿照顾工作，其中约120万女性将大部分时间都用于此，每天超过10小时。许多女性需要花费数小时通勤去寻找有偿的照顾工作，回家后又不得不继续做无偿的照顾工作。波哥大正在尝试解决这一问题，同时提升照顾工作和照顾者的社会地位，强调她们不应仅仅承担这些责任，而应拥有更丰富的生活。
波哥大正在推动一种新型的照顾模式，即“照顾区块”，这些社区中心为女性提供免费洗衣、法律援助、职业培训、心理健康服务等，同时她们的孩子或年长的亲属由附近的教师和工作人员照顾。这种模式不仅在本地推广，还正在全球范围内扩展。几周前，美国某城市宣布将在2026年试点这一模式。照顾区块的模式让照顾者能够专注于自己的需求，比如提升技能、改善健康状况，或进行其他活动，而无需担心照顾责任。
波哥大的这一创新背后，是女性运动的推动。2010年，哥伦比亚成为第一个要求政府量化无偿工作量的国家。2012年的首次时间使用调查发现，照顾者每年提供超过350亿小时的无偿劳动，占该国GDP的五分之一以上，其中80%由女性完成。这些数据促使政府采取行动，推动政策变革。
波哥大市的市长克劳迪娅·洛佩斯（Claudia López）在2019年当选，她以反腐败和性别平等著称，是波哥大首位女性市长，也是该国首位公开出柜的市长。她的“照顾区块”政策基于“三R”原则：承认、重新分配和减少照顾工作。她通过行政命令启动了这一系统，并在2020-2024年的发展计划中分配了约5200亿比索（约合13亿美元）的资金，其中大部分来自现有服务预算的重新分配和公共设施的改造。
然而，这一政策的未来并不确定。洛佩斯的继任者卡洛斯·费尔南多·加兰（Carlos Fernando Galán）则更倾向于财政责任和数据驱动的治理，他的竞选纲领与洛佩斯的性别平等理念大相径庭。尽管如此，加兰仍选择继续推进这一政策，因为照顾区块已获得联合国的关注，还获得了比尔及梅琳达·盖茨基金会的资金支持，并受到全球领导人的赞誉。
照顾区块的模式也正在其他城市落地。例如，塞拉利昂首都弗里敦计划在年底前开设首个照顾区块，墨西哥的瓜达拉哈拉市已批准资金支持多个“照顾社区”，而墨西哥城和圣地亚哥也已开始运营照顾区块。英国的活动人士和公共卫生官员也在尝试适应这一模式，而美国某城市计划在2026年试点。
照顾区块的愿景是让照顾者不再孤单。例如，波哥大的“El Castillo”（城堡）曾是臭名昭著的妓院，后被改造成“艺术与照顾中心”，为社区中的性工作者和移民提供服务。这里的照顾中心不仅提供儿童照护，还设有洗衣服务、免费衣物储物柜等，以满足不同需求。
尽管照顾区块模式已取得一定成效，但挑战依然存在。许多照顾者并不了解这些服务的存在，或对政府机构缺乏信任。此外，一些服务可能不足以满足所有需求。例如，Blanca Liliana Rodríguez曾受益于一项家庭照顾计划，但当该计划结束时，她又回到了独自承担照顾责任的状态。
波哥大市政府正在测试更经济的模式，将部分治疗服务转移到照顾区块内，以降低成本。尽管如此，他们仍计划在明年重启家庭照顾服务。同时，加兰政府也在继续扩展低成本的照顾模式，如新增两个照顾区块，并引入由城市植物园组织的自然疗法课程。
美国的Ai-jen Poo认为，尽管美国文化中存在家庭独立的观念，但照顾区块在美国也有其适用性。她指出，美国的基础设施与现实情况之间存在脱节，许多家庭无法独自承担照顾责任，因此需要更系统的支持。
在波哥大的照顾区块中，一位名叫Jason Díaz的36岁洗衣服务负责人表示，他的工作让他更加敏感和人性化，学会了在人们请求帮助之前就察觉他们的需求。他强调，照顾不仅是帮助，而是一种共同的责任。
“照顾不是帮助，而是共同责任。”——这句标语挂在波哥大“艺术与照顾中心”的墙上，体现了这一模式的核心理念。
In Bogotá’s historic downtown, a modest government building sits in the shadow of a gilded statue of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator who freed much of South America from Spanish rule. Inside, on the fourth floor, a manzana del cuidado, or care block, pulses with a different kind of revolution.
On a bright October morning, a circle of small children sat around a turquoise table, wide-eyed as their teacher read a Halloween story. In another room, a group of mothers and grandmothers bent over glass jars and wicks, learning to turn used containers into candles during a recycling workshop led by an official from the city’s environmental division. In the main hall, a half dozen women in sneakers and leggings followed an instructor’s aerobics routine, laughing as they stretched and lunged.
This space is one of 25 neighborhood hubs that have opened across Colombia’s capital since 2020, all part of an ambitious citywide effort to tackle “time poverty” — the lack of time for anything beyond the crushing, invisible burden of unpaid care work that falls overwhelmingly on women.
In Bogotá, a city of 8 million people, nearly 4 million women do some form of unpaid care work, and about 1.2 million dedicate most of their time to it, meaning 10 hours a day or more. Many commute for hours to reach paid care jobs, only to return home and do more unpaid care.
At a care block, a woman can access a variety of services while the person she cares for is looked after by teachers and staff nearby. She can hand off her laundry to an attendant, finish her schooling, meet with a lawyer, consult a psychologist, or learn job skills. The scope of activities is not limited to errands, either: she can also read a novel, catch up with friends, or just get some rest. And the system extends beyond the physical blocks — mobile buses bring comprehensive services to rural areas, and an at-home program targets caregivers who support those with severe disabilities and therefore cannot leave their houses.
Bogotá is trying to do something tricky: elevate both care work and caregivers, while also saying, “You shouldn’t have to be doing this so much — you deserve a full life beyond caring for kids, for aging relatives, for your partner.“
Understanding how Bogotá built its care system — and the challenges it faces — offers a template for other cities. And indeed, what started as a local experiment is now gaining traction internationally. Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, expects to open its first care block by this year’s end. Guadalajara in Mexico approved funding for several “care communities” earlier this summer, and care blocks are already operating in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. Activists and public health officials in England are trying to adapt the model, and a funder is even seeking to pilot care blocks in an American city in 2026.
The novel idea is putting caregivers — not just care recipients — at the center of policy, says Ai-jen Poo, a leading voice in the US care work movement and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Poo traveled to Bogotá in 2023 to learn more and said the program “blew her mind.” Before the pandemic, she added, most people didn’t identify as caregivers per se — even if they saw themselves as moms, parents, children.
“What could be the next big breakthrough is cities putting the idea of a caregiver and intergenerational care at the center of how you design access to services,” Poo said. “That’s the future.”
Behind Bogotá’s care revolution is a women’s movement with teeth.
In 2010, Colombia became the first country to legally require that its government quantify how much unpaid work was being done and by whom. The initial time-use survey, conducted in 2012, found that caregivers provided more than 35 billion hours of labor each year, amounting to more than one-fifth of the country’s GDP. Women did 80 percent of that work.
The political will to do something about those statistics started to build. One movement bolstering women in the city was the Mothers of False Positives, led by women whose sons had been killed by the military in the mid-2000s; the military then falsely presented these men as guerrilla fighters to inflate its own body counts. The mothers transformed their grief into a public reckoning, marching, testifying, and demanding justice — reframing the work of motherhood itself as a form of political resistance.
Bogotá’s social landscape made space for that kind of organizing. Decades of civil war and displacement had reshaped the city, creating an openness to more fluid household structures. Extended families are common, with grandmothers, aunts, and sisters raising children together, often out of necessity. Single mothers aren’t whispered about as moral failures like they sometimes are in the US.
All these factors paved the way for Claudia López’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Lopez had already built a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader who unapologetically centered gender equity. The then-49-year-old ran as an openly gay woman in a Catholic country, aiming to become both Bogotá’s first female and its first LGBTQ mayor — and won with 35 percent of the vote in a tight four-way race.
“The women’s vote was crucial in setting the stage for this,” Ai-jen Poo recalled. “And they were ready with their economic priorities and gave the mayor a mandate, if not the actual solution.”
Care blocks, the signature policy of López’s administration, are built around the “3 Rs”: recognize, redistribute, and reduce. Recognize that care work is real work that sustains society. Redistribute it — not just between women and men, but to care recipients when able, and to the state, employers, and communities. And reduce the overall burden so individual caregivers aren’t consumed by it.
López launched this District of Care System in 2020 through an executive decree, which gave her the authority to create the programs but also meant any future mayor could undo them just as easily. The initiative was allocated 5.2 trillion pesos (about US $1.3 billion) in the city’s 2020–24 development plan — much of it from reallocating existing service budgets and cost savings from turning single-use public facilities into new multi-purpose hubs. López’s administration later helped pass a law through the city council requiring different agencies to fund and run the care system. Unlike a decree, the law couldn’t be undone by a future mayor alone.
Colombia bars mayors from running for consecutive re-election, so as Lopez’s term neared its end, no one knew whether the next leader would continue her signature policy.
Her successor, Carlos Fernando Galán, couldn’t have been more different. The son of Luis Carlos Galán — a presidential candidate assassinated in 1989 for confronting narco-politics and corruption — the younger Galán billed himself as a centrist technocrat focused on fiscal responsibility and data-driven governance. In 2023, he won on a platform of public safety and restoring trust in government, far from Lopez’s more liberal and feminist message.
Galán could have pushed to end the care blocks. But the system had momentum, having earned international attention from the United Nations, funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies for its at-home assistance component, and praise from leaders around the world. All this made it easy for Galán to ride the goodwill and claim credit for the accolades his city kept earning for running programs in spaces most people would never expect.
For 14 years, El Castillo was one of Bogotá’s most notorious brothels—a place where businessmen, mobsters, and foreign clients paid for access to its VIP floors. Its ties to drug trafficking networks made it the target of a 2017 raid, after which the building sat abandoned for three years.
In 2020, the city converted the facility into the Castillo de las Artes — the Castle of the Arts — a cultural hub and care block.
Lebeb Infante, the care block’s director, was matter-of-fact about Castillo’s history and unapologetic about its current clients. “This neighborhood has the highest concentration of sex workers in the locality,” she said. “Many of them are caregivers — they have children, they’re supporting families. We also have a huge migrant population, people fleeing violence in Venezuela and rural Colombia. So the services here have to work differently.”
Offerings must account not only for gender, but for immigration status, which means helping people navigate bureaucracy when they don’t have papers or IDs and need to get certified for work or enroll in school. This particular block has two laundromats instead of one, plus a free clothing closet. “If someone needs pants to go to a job interview, we give them pants,” Infante explained.
El Castillo is also home to an El Arte de Cuidarte, or Art of Care center — the child care component that exists in every care block across the city.
On the day I visited, children’s voices rang out from behind an arched doorway. Streamers in purple and green — Halloween decorations — hung from the ceiling. Like any preschool classroom, it was bright and chaotic, with walls covered in artwork and educational posters.
The Art of Care programs serve a wider age range than traditional daycare, welcoming children from 11 months to 11 years old. Bogotá already has a robust public daycare system: free centers have existed since 1968, managed by the national child welfare agency and the city’s social integration office. These care block programs have a more specific purpose: free up time for caregivers so they can prioritize services, both for long-term goals and their immediate needs.
Parents don’t just drop off their children and leave to run errands all across the city. Many of the errands can be completed right there on site. One of the key challenges for caregivers dealing with “time poverty” is finding space in their day for anything else — their own health concerns or new credentials that could put them on a more secure financial footing. The Art of Care tries to eliminate some of that friction.
Juliana Martínez Londoño, the deputy secretary of Bogotá’s Women’s Secretariat, emphasized that the Art of Care was not meant to compete with the city’s existing daycare infrastructure.“But the Art of Care is much more flexible,” she said. “It can be mobile, it can adapt to different schedules, it can go where caregivers are.”
An even more ambitious vision for the future of child care comes from Camila Gómez, the director of Bogotá’s citywide care initiative. She imagines 24-hour mobile child care centers for women who work night shifts, like bus drivers or recyclers who sort trash before dawn. The service could be more widely available, coming to a university student on exam day, or an employee whose company would pay for the service and get a tax break in return. “The goal is to not limit the Art of Care to people who are taking services at the care block,” Gómez said. “We want to make it for anybody who needs it.”
My trip overlapped with a citywide graduation ceremony for women who had completed month-long trainings in topics such as digital literacy, entrepreneurship, or professional caregiving.
The auditorium was packed with caregivers in purple graduation gowns and caps. Some had brought their children, who squirmed in seats or played quietly in the aisles. Others had wanted to come but couldn’t make it work, still home caring for someone who needed them.
One hundred and twenty-seven women were graduating that day. Many were over 65. For some, this was the first time they’d ever graduated from anything. The crowd sang along to the city’s anthem — “Bogotá! Bogotá! Bogotá!” — and women smiled proudly as they walked across the stage to receive their certificates.
The mayor and many of his high-ranking staff had come to congratulate the women. “You have to bet on their autonomy,” Laura Tami, the city’s Women’s Secretariat, said from the stage. Galán also laid out the administration’s strategy: freeing more women from violence, including economic violence, by giving them the tools to become more independent. It was a notably feminist message from a mayor who had run as a centrist technocrat.
The ceremony was moving, but it also raised real questions about scale. Over 3,500 women have completed these 30-day training programs, and the city hopes to increase that number to 9,000. This would be progress, but it’s a small fraction of Bogotá’s 1.2 million full-time caregivers.
Plus, my conversations at different care blocks surfaced the same challenge over and over. Many caregivers just didn’t know that these supports existed. And plenty who did didn’t trust them and didn’t believe Bogotá would actually keep them running, or that the services would actually be free. Some had shown up to care blocks looking for food and had been turned away empty-handed.
“We really do need to work harder on spreading the word [and] improving trust,” said Jason Díaz, the manager of the laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block. “There is a lot of stigma with government institutions.”
And sometimes the services are just not enough. Blanca Liliana Rodríguez told me about the at-home assistance program her family had benefited from last year. Rodríguez cares for her two adult sons — one with physical disabilities, one with mental disabilities — plus her 77-year-old mother and her 82-year-old father-in-law, who lives elsewhere. She’d been cooking three meals a day for her father-in-law and delivering them to his house.
The psychologists who came through as part of the government program worked with her family for three months, teaching Rodríguez and her sons how to communicate better, and even leading couples therapy with one of her sons and his girlfriend. They helped her realize she was taking on far more than she needed to. Her sons started helping with cleaning and picking up medications and she joined a new WhatsApp group with 30 other caregivers in her neighborhood that remains active to this day.
But when the time-limited services ended, Rodríguez was on her own again, still overwhelmed by the sheer scope of what she was managing. “Three months is definitely not enough time for the at-home assistance program,” she told me.
The city officials accompanying me on the visit immediately defended the short timeline. The program, they emphasized, was intentionally brief — designed to “install capacity” in caregivers and make them more resilient. It felt a bit like PR for a funding problem, not to mention condescending — these women were already extraordinarily resilient. They were just dealing with their own health and financial problems, their own exhaustion. Rodríguez said her memory had been getting worse.
At the beginning of this year, Bogotá stopped administering the at-home assistance program that had helped Rodríguez and her family. The Bloomberg funding that had supported the services had run out, and Galán’s team hadn’t figured out how to keep paying for it, let alone scale it up.
An independent evaluation, conducted over the last two years, found that the at-home program had freed up over 18,000 hours for caregivers and reduced their daily unpaid care work by more than an hour. Half of the caregivers reported feeling less burdened, and nearly half of people with disabilities became more independent.
But it was expensive. So the city tested a cheaper model, moving some therapeutic services into the care blocks rather than delivering everything at home. The new hybrid model cut costs per participant by 57 percent while still reducing caregiver depression and anxiety.
When I asked Galán’s administration whether the city would resume its at-home programming, Tami, the women’s secretary, responded that they planned to restart services next year. The city aims to run both models: full at-home assistance for caregivers who truly can’t leave their houses, and the lower-cost hybrid for others.
Meanwhile, Galán has continued expanding the less expensive parts of the care system. His team opened two new care blocks this year and added programming like nature therapy sessions run by the city’s botanical garden.
James Anderson, who leads the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, told me that he expects the care block idea to expand further around the world, and that the United Nations Development Programme has been working actively behind the scenes to help. At a 2024 Bloomberg event in Mexico City last year, more than 70 mayors toured the city’s own version of care blocks, known as Utopías, and showed “incredible interest.”
Anderson thinks the model could follow the trajectory of climate action planning. Before 2005, he pointed out, mayors didn’t talk specifically about “climate”: they had water projects, sanitation projects, housing projects, all run by different agencies with no coordination. Twenty years later, every major city has a climate action plan that coordinates efforts across city hall. “That’s the trajectory that I imagine this issue will travel,” he said.
That vision is already underway. CHANGE, the City Hub and Network for Gender Equity, is a global network of city governments led by former mayoral staffers in London and Los Angeles. They’ve been working to spread the Bogotá model, developing an implementation guide and planning workshops for interested cities. Currently, they’re coordinating with a team in greater Manchester in England, have been helping Freetown in West Africa, and are actively involved in identifying a US city for a pilot next year, though conscious of the growing American backlash to anything associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“If you can’t make the case for why this won’t make your dollar stretch, there’s no point in having the conversation,” said Leslie Crosdale, CHANGE’s co-executive director. “It’s an efficient system and makes your city more resilient.”
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, credits both CHANGE and Claudia López with helping kick off the idea in her city. Their care block is expected to launch by mid-2026, and in the meantime, Freetown is opening three temporary spaces before the end of December to meet demand from women in the community. “What excited me was being able to give back an opportunity that many women lost—the opportunity for education, the opportunity to just get health care,” Aki-Sawyerr told me.
Ai-jen Poo, who leads the National Domestic Workers Alliance, pointed to a disconnect in the US, where cultural expectations assume families can manage needs independently, despite millions being nowhere close to affording enough care. “You have this mismatch between the infrastructure and the reality where the individual family is just bearing the brunt in an impossible situation,” she said. “I think there’s a use case in the US for care blocks. It probably won’t look exactly the same, but I do think that there’s a lot there.”
Back in Bogotá, Jason Díaz, the 36-year-old manager of laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block, offered a glimpse of what that could look like in practice. He told me his job had made him more sensitive, more humane, teaching him to slow down more, and notice when someone needs help before they ask. “You learn to do it everywhere — at home, on the street,” he said. “It teaches you how to help people without expecting anything in return. The important thing is to be part of the solution.”
At the Castillo de las Artes care block, a sign hung on the wall in bright purple and green: “Cuidar no es ayudar, es corresponsabilidad.” To care is not to help; it is co-responsibility.
Spanish-English interpretation for reporting was conducted by Catalina Hernandez. This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
2025-12-05 07:20:00
2025年12月2日，唐纳德·特朗普在白宫内阁会议上讲话，国防部长皮特·赫格塞特在场旁听。| Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
本文出自《Logoff》每日通讯，旨在帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。请在此订阅。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：特朗普政府正面临关于其在打击所谓毒品贩子行动中涉嫌战争罪的新一轮审查。发生了什么？
自9月初以来，美国一直在加勒比海和太平洋地区打击所谓的“毒品船”，已造成至少83人死亡。但其中第一次打击——9月2日的行动——因《华盛顿邮报》上周报道称国防部长皮特·赫格塞特下令“杀光船上所有人”而受到特别关注。目前所知的情况如下：
国际法怎么说？
在海上杀害无助人员——在第一次袭击中，船上的幸存者已被击毁，因此处于无助状态——这显然是战争罪，同时也违反了五角大楼自己的战争法手册。目前的主要争议是9月2日的后续袭击是谁下令的。赫格塞特表示他当时并未在场，而是由海军上将弗兰克·布拉德利下令。
大局如何？
当前关于战争罪的讨论背后，还有一个更广泛的问题：特朗普政府对所有这些袭击都没有法律授权。法律专家普遍认为，其声称美国与负责这些船只的贩毒集团处于“非国际性武装冲突”中的论点毫无根据。
接下来会发生什么？
国会正在罕见地进行跨党派调查，以了解9月2日事件的经过。周四，国会议员观看了袭击的视频，并听取了军方官员的证词。民主党议员吉姆·希姆斯称该事件是“我担任公职以来见过最令人不安的事情之一”。
好了，是时候下线了……我非常喜欢PBS最新推出的播客《Settle In》的最新一期。主持人乔夫·贝内特与演员尼克·奥弗曼（因出演《公园与游憩》而闻名）探讨了“成为人类的意义”以及制造东西和积极参与公民生活的价值。希望您也会喜欢，祝您今晚愉快。我们明天再见。
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is facing renewed scrutiny over an apparent war crime committed in its campaign against alleged drug traffickers.
What happened? The US has been striking alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean and the Pacific since early September, killing at least 83 people. But it’s the first strike, on September 2, that has become an object of particular scrutiny after the Washington Post reported last week that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody” on the boat.
Here’s what has been reported so far:
What does international law say? Killing helpless people at sea — and with their boat disabled in the first attack, the survivors would have been helpless — is unambiguously a war crime, as well as a violation of the Pentagon’s own law of war manual. The major dispute is who ordered the follow-on strike on September 2. Hegseth has said he was not in the room when it happened and that it was ordered by Adm. Frank Bradley.
What’s the big picture? There’s a broader issue underlying the current war crimes debate: The Trump administration has no legal authority for any of the strikes it has conducted. Legal experts have widely dismissed its argument that the US is engaged in a “noninternational armed conflict” with the cartels responsible for the alleged drug boats as baseless.
What happens next? Congress is, somewhat unusually, pursuing bipartisan oversight into what happened on September 2. On Thursday, lawmakers viewed video of the attack and heard testimony from military officials. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes described it as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
I really enjoyed the latest episode of PBS’s new podcast Settle In. Host Geoff Bennett speaks with actor Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation fame about “the whole point of being a human” and the value of making things and being an active citizen. I hope you enjoy it, too, and as always, have a great evening. We’ll see you back here tomorrow.
2025-12-05 03:15:00
去年，加州和华盛顿州禁止养殖章鱼以获取其肉，其他七个州以及美国参议院也提出了类似的法案。智利和西班牙的立法者也在考虑禁止养殖章鱼。尽管有如此多的立法行动，但目前全球还没有一家章鱼养殖场。
故事内情：
这一故事是Animal Charity Evaluators支持的一系列报道之一，该组织获得了EarthShare的资助。反对章鱼养殖的运动，由动物福利活动人士、海洋保护主义者和关心动物福利的学者领导，可能看起来像是在寻找一个不存在的问题。从理论上讲，养殖章鱼并不合理：它们是野生的、孤独的、食肉的且有同类相食的习性；在出生后的前两个月非常脆弱，大多数会死亡；它们的尿液含有大量氨，因此养殖公司必须处理大量污染的水。此外，章鱼还擅长逃脱。这些都是养殖章鱼时不想看到的特性。
但西班牙的Nueva Pescanova公司仍试图大规模养殖章鱼，以供应“高端国际市场”，如美国、韩国和日本，这些地方对章鱼肉的需求正在上升。目前，大量章鱼仍从野外捕捞用于食用。根据联合国粮农组织的数据，2023年全球捕捞了超过35万吨章鱼，相当于超过1亿只个体。它们通常被捕捉在陷阱中，误以为是自然庇护所，然后用各种令人不安的方法杀死，包括用棍棒击打头部、刺穿大脑或悬挂至窒息而死。
然而，某些地区的章鱼捕捞量因过度捕捞而下降，因此Nueva Pescanova希望尽快在其通过环境评估后启动第一家章鱼养殖场。但反对者认为，养殖章鱼在经济上和道德上都不可行，因为章鱼具有复杂的需要和出色的认知能力。章鱼会使用工具、解决问题，甚至喜欢玩耍。在野外，它们的活动范围可以覆盖数英亩，用于狩猎、躲藏和探索。生态学家兼非营利组织Aquatic Life Institute的主管Sophika Kostyniuk表示：“这是一种孤独的动物，需要大量刺激……将它们放入高密度的封闭环境中，会产生无法估量的压力，导致攻击行为和高比例的同类相食。这完全是不道德的。”
章鱼养殖的（不）可行性： 2019年，Nueva Pescanova声称已经掌握了在人工环境中养殖章鱼的技术，包括孵化章鱼卵、将其养到成年并繁殖下一代。该公司曾表示，到2023年，养殖的章鱼肉将出现在商店货架上。然而，其养殖场计划仍在等待环境评估，因此具体启动时间尚不明确。另一家西班牙海鲜公司Grupo Profand以及一些大学研究机构也在努力探索章鱼养殖的商业化途径。
2023年，非营利组织Eurogroup for Animals获得了Nueva Pescanova在加那利群岛建立的第一家章鱼养殖场的计划文件，该计划最初由BBC报道。文件显示，该公司计划：
在野外和人工环境中，章鱼在高密度下常常表现出同类相食的行为。但Nueva Pescanova声称在其试验中没有观察到这种情况。这引起了章鱼专家、加拿大大学的Jennifer Mather教授的关注，她认为章鱼无法被经济或人道地养殖。Mather表示，她曾要求Nueva Pescanova提供数据，但该公司拒绝了。她说：“这让我感到科学家的警报器响了。给我证据，如果一家商业公司不给我证据，我怀疑是因为证据根本不存在。”
Nueva Pescanova拒绝了对本故事的采访请求，并未回应关于Mather请求数据的问题。通过电子邮件，一名发言人表示：“在Nueva Pescanova通过水产养殖培育的五代章鱼中，没有记录到任何同类相食的情况。”
Mather还有其他理由认为养殖章鱼不可行。章鱼是食肉动物，对螃蟹情有独钟，但喂养螃蟹成本高昂，经济上并不划算。如果喂养人工鱼饲料，虽然章鱼会吃，但它们的生长速度会变慢，体重也会减少，这对章鱼养殖的商业可行性不利。然而，Nueva Pescanova的计划指出，其章鱼可以在短时间内达到2.5至3公斤的市场重量，死亡率在10%至15%之间。公司还声称养殖章鱼有助于保护野生种群。Mather驳斥了这一说法，指出野生章鱼种群通常状况良好，因为商业捕鱼已经消灭了许多章鱼的天敌，如鲨鱼和大型鱼类。虽然西班牙海域的章鱼数量近年来有所下降，但Nueva Pescanova的保护主张缺乏证据支持。
谁支持章鱼养殖？ 我希望能找到支持章鱼养殖的人，但Nueva Pescanova和Grupo Profand拒绝接受采访，于是我联系了Roger Villanueva。他是西班牙国家研究委员会下属的海洋研究所的海洋生物学家，研究章鱼数十年，包括如何养殖它们。几个月前，他与其他人共同撰写了一封发表在《海洋政策》期刊上的信件，反对美国对章鱼养殖的禁令，呼吁采取“平衡的方法”。超过100位同行也签署了这封信。值得注意的是，信件的合著者之一为一家日本快餐连锁公司提供咨询服务，该公司专门经营章鱼菜品，而一些签署者则与海鲜行业有联系，包括一些与Nueva Pescanova有关联的人士。
当我与Villanueva交谈时，他并未否认章鱼养殖存在一些实际障碍，但他认为这些障碍可以克服。他不认同动物福利方面的担忧。“章鱼是聪明的动物，”他承认，但认为养殖它们与养殖鸡和猪没有本质区别——“这些动物我们已经作为食物养殖了数千年。”这一论点也是Nueva Pescanova所提出的。Villanueva告诉我，反对章鱼养殖的运动源于一种“情感上的观点”，但考虑到猪和鸡在养殖过程中受到的恶劣待遇，我们养殖它们并不意味着我们应该养殖章鱼。章鱼的许多特性与密集养殖不兼容：它们是孤独的，但在养殖场中会被密集地关在水箱中；它们喜欢黑暗的庇护所，但在养殖过程中会经历间歇性的强光；它们是食肉猎手，却被迫依赖人工饲料；它们的认知能力加上我们对如何在人工环境中给予它们良好生活了解有限，可能会加剧它们的痛苦。不过，Villanueva表示，养殖场可以通过多种方式衡量和改善章鱼的福利，例如观察它们的食欲、检测皮质醇水平、监测皮肤颜色变化，这些都能反映它们的情绪状态。养殖场还可以保持良好的水质、将大小不同的章鱼分开（以减少同类相食）、提供它们在野外喜欢的藏身之处，这些Nueva Pescanova都表示会做到。“确保章鱼养殖场的福利并不容易，”Villanueva说，“但如果养殖场建立良好的标准，这是可能的。”
然而，Mather对此并不认同。“你可以做这些事情来判断它们是否感到压力，但答案会是‘是的’，”她说，“然后你该怎么办？”更根本的是，Mather认为章鱼养殖剥夺了章鱼作为章鱼的本性。“表达物种典型行为的自由在某种程度上是最重要的动物福利之一，”她说，“这不仅仅是‘活到被屠宰’的问题，而是‘我们是否真的剥夺了动物生命的基本权利’？”
学术界的抗争： Villanueva和Mather之间的分歧反映了研究水生动物的科学家群体中更广泛的分歧，以及他们提出的问题类型。美国迈阿密大学的环境科学与政策教授Jennifer Jacquet正在领导学术界反对章鱼养殖的行动，包括签署支持美国全国禁养章鱼养殖的信件，该信件由大约100位学者联署。她表示，许多海洋科学研究者的目标并非单纯保护海洋和野生动物，而是“增加食物生产，也许让渔业可持续，以免过度捕捞导致自身灭绝”。Mather指出，许多研究章鱼的学者——包括鱿鱼、墨鱼和其他一些动物的研究者——“并不真正关心动物本身，而是将它们视为可利用的资源。”（在2010年，章鱼国际顾问委员会的一份通讯中，一位成员曾表示，她正在寻找一家出版社出版章鱼食谱，许多同行都贡献了“精彩的食谱”。）
在陆地养殖动物的学术领域也存在类似的情况。尽管有一部分章鱼研究社区专注于章鱼的商业化用途，但许多学者——包括那些不属于该领域的——也在努力保护章鱼免受痛苦和剥削。章鱼被用于各种科学实验，包括进化生物学、神经科学和机器人学等领域。在1990年代，Mather帮助在加拿大推动了对实验中使用的章鱼等头足类动物的基本福利保护，其他国家随后也跟进。到2012年，一群著名神经科学家声明，证据表明所有鸟类和哺乳动物，以及许多其他动物，包括章鱼，都具有意识。2021年，Netflix热门纪录片《我的章鱼老师》（My Octopus Teacher）讲述了一位人类与南非野生章鱼之间的感人故事，赢得了奥斯卡最佳纪录片奖（Mather是该纪录片的科学顾问）。一年后，英国通过了一项法律，宣布所有脊椎动物和一些无脊椎动物（包括章鱼）具有感知能力，未来法律需考虑它们的福利。
然而，章鱼养殖的前景可能成为这一进步的重大障碍。它也揭示了食品养殖行业在考虑动物福祉时的局限性。这些行业会为了利润最大化而不断推动动物的极限，例如培育体型巨大的鸡，以便从每只鸡身上获取更多肉；将野生中进行史诗级迁徙的鲑鱼关在狭小的水箱中；如果能拓展新市场，就将孤独的章鱼密集养殖。Mather和一些关注动物福利的学者希望行业能超越利润的考量。“归根结底，赚钱不应该是我们真正关心的事情，”她说，“我们与所有动物共享这个星球，我们的基本态度应该是：‘我们是否在关心它们？’”
Last year, California and Washington state banned farming octopuses for their meat, and bills have been introduced in seven other states — plus the US Senate — to do the same. Lawmakers in Chile and Spain are weighing a prohibition on farming them, too.
All this legislative activity, and yet there’s not a single octopus farm anywhere in the world.
This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.
The movement to ban octopus farming before it starts — led by animal welfare activists, ocean conservationists, and concerned academics — might be easy to dismiss as a solution in search of a problem. On paper, farming them doesn’t even make sense: they’re wild, solitary, carnivorous, and cannibalistic; in the first two months of their lives they’re incredibly fragile and the vast majority die; and their urine contains high amounts of ammonia, which means whatever company that farms them would have to deal with the ordeal of a lot of polluted water.
They’re also talented escape artists.
These are all traits you really don’t want in an animal you’re trying to farm. But it hasn’t stopped the Spanish seafood giant Nueva Pescanova from trying to make large-scale octopus farming a thing in order to supply “premium international markets,” like the US, South Korea, and Japan, where consumer demand for octopus meat is on the rise.
Currently, huge numbers of octopuses are already caught from the wild to be used for food. In 2023, over 350,000 metric tons of octopuses were captured from the ocean, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which totals well over 100 million individual animals. They’re typically caught in traps — which they mistake for natural shelter — and then killed using a variety of disturbing methods, including clubbing them in the head, stabbing their brains, or hanging them in the air to suffocate to death.
But octopus catches have declined in some regions due to overfishing — and so, to create a more reliable supply, Nueva Pescanova hopes to open its first octopus farm as soon as it passes an environmental review. But to those who oppose octopus farming, the pursuit is impractical at best, and morally atrocious at worst, given the animals’ complex needs and impressive cognitive abilities. Octopuses can use tools, solve problems, and they even like to engage in play. In the wild, their home ranges span several acres where they hunt, hide, and explore.
“This is a solitary animal that requires a lot of stimulus…So putting it into a confined setting that has high density with other [animals] creates immeasurable stress, produces aggression, produces high levels of cannibalism,” Sophika Kostyniuk, an ecologist and managing director of the nonprofit Aquatic Life Institute, told me. “It is just totally unethical.”
In 2019, Nueva Pescanova said it had figured out how to raise octopuses in captivity — that it could successfully hatch octopus eggs, raise them to adulthood, and breed them for another generation. Farmed octopus meat would be on store shelves by 2023, the company said at the time. But its start date remains unclear, as its proposed farm in the Canary Islands is still awaiting environmental review.
Another major Spanish seafood company, Grupo Profand — which didn’t respond to an interview request for this story — and a few university research centers are also busy trying to figure out how to commercialize octopus farming.
In 2023, the nonprofit Eurogroup for Animals obtained Nueva Pescanova’s plans for its first octopus farm on the Canary Islands, which was first reported by the BBC. The documents revealed that the company planned to:
Both in the wild and in captivity, it’s not uncommon for octopuses to turn cannibalistic at high densities. But Nueva Pescanova has claimed it hasn’t observed any cannibalism in its trials. That caught the attention of Jennifer Mather, an octopus expert and psychology professor at the University of Lethbridge, who believes octopuses cannot be economically nor humanely farmed. Mather told me she had asked Nueva Pescanova to send her the data, which, she alleges, the company declined to provide.
“That makes my scientist alarm bells go off,” Mather said. “Show me the evidence, and in the case of a commercial enterprise, if they don’t show me the evidence, I suspect it’s because the evidence isn’t there.”
Nueva Pescanova declined an interview request for this story and didn’t respond to a question about Mather’s request for data. Over email, a spokesperson said that “not a single case of cannibalism has been recorded in five generations of octopuses raised by Nueva Pescanova in aquaculture.”
Mather has other reasons to think farming octopuses is not feasible. Octopuses are carnivores who are “nuts about crabs,” she said, but feeding them crabs, which are expensive, is “economically not a good idea.” If you feed them fish pellets, which Nueva Pescanova has stated it will, “they’ll eat them, but they will grow more slowly and gain less weight,” Mather said, which is a strike against the commercial viability of octopus farming.
But Nueva Pescanova’s plan states that its octopuses can quickly reach a market weight of 2.5 to 3 kilograms with a mortality rate of 10 to 15 percent.
The company has also argued that farming octopuses will help conserve wild populations. Mather dismisses that claim, explaining that wild octopus populations are generally fine because the commercial fishing industry’s plundering of the oceans has killed off many of the octopus’ predators, like sharks and large fishes. While octopus populations in Spanish waters have fallen in recent years due to overfishing, Nueva Pescanova’s conservation claim is dubious; there’s little to no evidence that fish farming has helped wild fish populations rebound.
I wanted to talk to someone supportive of octopus farming, and since Nueva Pescanova and Grupo Profand wouldn’t talk to me, I reached out to Roger Villanueva.
A marine biologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar, part of the Spanish government’s national research council, Villanueva has studied octopuses for decades — including how to farm them. A couple months ago, he co-authored a letter in the journal Marine Policy arguing against a proposed ban on octopus farming in the US, calling for a “balanced approach” to the issue. Over 100 of his peers signed it, too. (It’s worth noting that his co-author on the letter consults for a Japanese fast food chain that specializes in octopus dishes, and several of the co-signers have affiliations with the seafood industry, including some with ties to Nueva Pescanova).
When I spoke to Villanueva, he didn’t deny that there are some practical obstacles that stand in the way of commercializing octopus farming, though he believes they can be overcome. But he doesn’t agree with the welfare concerns.
“The animals are intelligent,” he acknowledged, but in his view, farming them is not fundamentally different from farming chickens or pigs — “animals that we [have used] as food for many, many thousands of years.” It’s an argument Nueva Pescanova has made, too. The movement to preemptively ban farming octopus, Villanueva told me, comes from a “sentimental point of view.”
But the fact that we farm chickens and pigs for food isn’t really an argument in favor of farming octopuses, considering how terribly farmed pigs and chickens are treated. What’s likely more relevant is that octopuses possess so many traits and behaviors that are incompatible with intensive farming: they’re solitary, but on farms, they’d be tightly packed into tanks with other octopuses. They like dark shelters, but they would be subjected to occasional periods of constant light. They’re carnivorous hunters who would be forced to subsist on manmade pellets. And their cognitive sophistication, plus how little we understand about how to give them a good life in captivity, could further compound that suffering.
But Villanueva said that farms can measure and improve octopuses’ welfare in a number of ways, such as observing their appetites, checking cortisol levels, and monitoring skin color changes, which can provide insight into their moods. Farms can maintain good water quality, keep small and large octopuses separate (to reduce cannibalism), and provide places for them to hide and shelter, as they like to do in the wild — all things that Nueva Pescanova says it will do.
“It’s not easy work” to ensure good welfare on octopus farms, Villanueva said, but it’s possible if farms develop good standards.
None of this, however, sits well with Mather. “You can do all these things to figure out whether they’re stressed or not — the answer’s going to be, ‘Yes, they are,’” Mather said. “And then what do you do?”
More fundamentally, Mather said, octopus farming denies octopuses the ability to be octopuses. “The freedom to express species-typical behavior is in some ways the most important welfare one,” she said. It’s not just about “surviving until somebody comes and slaughters you; it’s about, ‘Are we really taking away the fundamentals of an animal’s life?’”
The disagreements between Villanueva and Mather reflect a broader divide among the scientists who study aquatic animals, and the kinds of questions they ask.
Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental science and policy professor at the University of Miami, is leading the academic charge against octopus farming, including a letter in support of a US-wide ban that was signed by around 100 academics. She told me that much of the marine science research community aims not to protect oceans and help wild animal populations thrive for their own sake, but to “increase [food] production, maybe make fisheries sustainable so that they don’t kill themselves by totally over-exploiting” fish populations. “You really have to think of [the field] as completely beholden to the industry interests.”
Mather said that many in the cephalopod research community — those who study octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and some other animals — “are not fundamentally interested in the animals qua animals; they’re interested in the animals as subjects,” she said, of “exploitative enterprise.” (In a 2010 newsletter of the Cephalopod International Advisory Council — an organization for cephalopod scientists — one member wrote that she was looking for a publisher for a cephalopod cookbook, for which many fellow members had “contributed some fabulous recipes.”)
There’s a similar dynamic at play in the academic fields that study animals farmed on land.
Still, while a significant segment of the cephalopod research community is focused on how octopuses can be used commercially, many within it — and outside of it — are pushing to protect octopuses from suffering and exploitation.
Octopuses are used in experimental research by scientists in a range of scientific fields, including evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and robotics. In the 1990s, Mather helped get some basic welfare protections for cephalopods used in experiments in her home country of Canada; other countries later followed. By 2012, a group of prominent neuroscientists declared that evidence indicates that all birds and mammals, “and many other creatures, including octopuses,” possess the capacity for consciousness.
And public interest in octopuses swelled in 2021, when the hit Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher — which captivated audiences with a story of a human relationship with a wild octopus in South Africa — won the Oscar for best documentary (Mather was a scientific adviser on the documentary). A year later, the UK passed a law declaring that all vertebrate animals and some invertebrates — including cephalopods — are sentient, and that future laws need to consider their welfare.
But the specter of octopus farming could pose a major setback to this progress. And it reveals that there’s no point beyond which the industries that raise animals for food will think twice about how far they’re pushing the animals themselves. They’ll breed chickens to grow so big they can’t walk, just to squeeze more meat out of each bird. They’ll cram salmon, who make epic migratory journeys in the wild, into small tanks. They’ll tightly pack solitary octopuses if it can help them expand into new markets.
But Mather and some of her welfare-minded colleagues want industry to look at more than just profit. “When it comes right down to it, how to make a lot of money should not be what we really care about,” she said. “We share this planet with the animals — all the animals — and our basic orientation should be, ‘Are we caring?’”
2025-12-04 20:45:00
这个故事最初发表于Vox的儿童新闻通讯Kids Today。在美国各地的学校操场上，大约在上午10点，孩子们在攀爬架上玩耍，从滑梯上滑下来，玩着绷带游戏或四人四角游戏，有的则在跑道上安静地和朋友聊天。这些孩子是幸运的。专家一致认为，课间休息是孩子学校生活中最重要的部分之一。“当孩子们玩耍，尤其是户外活动时，他们能感受到快乐，感受到连接，感受到自己在学校中属于某一部分。”非营利组织Playworks的首席执行官Elizabeth Cushing告诉我。但家长们和倡导者表示，如今许多孩子在课间休息时被留在教室里，无法享受到户外活动带来的全部益处。
在西方各州，极端高温正越来越多地迫使孩子们待在室内。亚利桑那州立大学健康解决方案学院的Allison Poulos教授表示，在一项从7月到9月进行的研究中，她的团队发现孩子们在课间休息时有大约40%的时间是在室内。在较冷的地区，也有多种因素影响孩子们的户外活动。Shanée Garner，费城家长组织Lift Every Voice Philly的执行主任表示：“我们听到一些校长说，他们不希望孩子们弄乱操场。我们也听到有人表示没有足够的工作人员，还有人说孩子们之间无法相处。”当孩子们在教室里度过课间休息时，他们通常比较安静，甚至可能在看一部电影。根据亚利桑那州的研究，那些在教室里度过课间的孩子，在上课时的学习准备程度不如那些在户外玩耍的孩子。
如今，全国各地的家庭都在呼吁增加户外活动时间，研究人员也在探索学校如何在气候变化的背景下让孩子们更多地接触户外或至少在室内更加活跃。倡导者表示，这些变化是必要的，因为没有玩耍，孩子们就无法学习。“课间休息对儿童的成长和发展非常重要，我们必须认真对待这个问题。”Poulos说。
课间休息不仅仅是课堂的休息时间，也是孩子们练习社交和情感技能的重要时刻。加州大学圣克鲁兹分校的社会学教授Rebecca London表示，通过玩耍，孩子们学会“如何合作、如何沟通、如何解决冲突”。他们还学会情绪调节：“如果我输了一场比赛，我是否能保持冷静并继续玩耍？”自由玩耍对儿童发展至关重要，对一些孩子来说，课间休息可能是他们一天中唯一没有结构的玩耍时间。自2001年《不让任何孩子掉队法案》（No Child Left Behind）引入高风险测试后，课间休息时间大幅减少。从2001年到2019年，平均每周的课间休息时间减少了60分钟，仅剩下每天25分钟。虽然一些州如加州已通过法律规定了孩子每天的最低课间休息时间，但这些法律并不强制要求户外活动。与此同时，由于气候变化，极端高温变得越来越频繁，孩子们在课间休息时经常面临超过100华氏度的高温。此外，许多操场在高温天气下并不适合玩耍，因为它们通常缺乏树木遮荫，且由黑色沥青等材料制成，这些材料在高温下会变得非常危险。在美国许多地区，野火导致的空气污染也成为一个问题。在加州，有时会有几天甚至几周的时间，孩子们无法外出，因为空气质量太差。与夏季的高温不同，冬季的气温在美国许多地方变得更为温和。然而，极端天气和异常寒冷的天气却变得更加频繁，可能会干扰孩子们的户外活动。户外课间休息的温度限制因学区而异，有时由学校管理人员单独决定。“我曾去过一些地方，温度低于35华氏度时就禁止户外活动，也去过一些地方，温度低于10华氏度时就禁止。”London说。一些学校的家长抱怨，即使在温和的冬季天气中，孩子们也无法外出。“总是有各种借口，比如太湿或者孩子们没有合适的衣服。”一位母亲在去年3月马萨诸塞州沃思堡的学区会议上说道。除了天气因素，学校有时也难以招聘或培训足够的课间监督员。Garner表示，课间和午餐的监督员是整个学区中薪资最低的工作人员之一。通常，“负责课间活动的成年人没有接受过任何培训或支持。”Cushing说。如果课间监督员没有接受过冲突解决和促进玩耍的培训，打斗事件就会增多，学校可能会让孩子们留在室内以减少混乱。但缺乏培训和关注课间工作人员的现象，反映了对儿童乐趣和自主权的更大程度忽视。Garner表示，学校已经失去了“孩子们会玩耍”的理解。取而代之的是，“孩子们被期望被管理。”
当孩子们待在室内时，他们的玩耍活动会受到极大限制。Poulos告诉我，大多数小学都没有体育馆，因此孩子们通常在教室里度过课间休息时间，这样他们就失去了运动的机会，无法与不同班级的同学社交，也无法自由选择去哪玩、玩什么。London说：“室内课间休息与户外课间休息完全不同。”在美国，低收入地区、城市以及服务更多有色人种家庭的学区，孩子们获得的户外课间时间比富裕的郊区或以白人为主的地区要少得多。2019年，KUOW对西雅图公立学校进行的一项调查得出一个令人震惊的结论：“白人孩子通常有更多课间时间，而黑人孩子则较少。”然而，倡导者和研究人员正在努力让所有孩子都能获得户外课间休息，或者至少是合理活跃的替代方案。一些寒冷地区的学校在操场设有大型遮蔽设施，以保护孩子们免受雨淋。London说，这些遮蔽设施也可以在炎热地区建造，以提供阴凉。亚利桑那州立大学已与坦佩市及其他组织合作，在校园内种植树木。同时，一些学校正在将黑色沥青替换为本地植物或其他地面覆盖物。如果课间休息必须在室内进行，校长们则通过指定某些教室用于特定活动，并允许学生在这些教室之间移动，来给予学生更多的灵活性。除了改善设施，对课间监督员进行简单的培训也能帮助减少冲突，Cushing说。甚至像用石头剪刀布来解决争执这样的小措施，也能减少冲突。当学校管理者看到良好组织的课间休息所带来的好处，包括学生更快地回到课堂，他们就更有可能接受一些小雨或阴天。其他人则在推动学区层面的政策改革。在费城，Lift Every Voice组织呼吁结束学校中的12项有害做法，包括剥夺课间休息时间。对Garner来说，这个问题很简单：“孩子们就是孩子，他们应该被当作人类，而不是机器来对待。”
洛杉矶的官员表示，家庭对移民与海关执法局（ICE）突袭的恐惧正在阻止他们让孩子入学，导致学区的入学人数显著下降。Jill Barshay在Hechinger报告中写道，特朗普政府的第一年对教育研究来说是毁灭性的：“重建对联邦数据的信心，并从一个混乱的年份中恢复机构知识，所需的时间远比拆解所需的时间要长。”看起来，Easy-Bake烤箱又回来了。我小儿子正在享受《Ada Twist，科学家》这本书，讲述一个家庭如何适应他们女儿对科学探索的热情（最初表现为想要爬上家具并对猫进行实验的欲望）。
This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
At about 10 am local time on school playgrounds across the United States, kids are climbing on jungle gyms and whooshing down slides. They’re playing bandage tag or foursquare. They’re walking around the track, quietly catching up with their friends.
Those are the lucky ones. Recess, experts agree, is one of the most crucial parts of a child’s school day.
“When kids get to play, and especially outside, they get to feel joy, they get to feel connection, they get to feel like they belong at school,” Elizabeth Cushing, CEO of the nonprofit Playworks, told me. “That’s the kind of experience we all want for them.”
But parents and advocates around the country say that, too often, kids are now spending recess in their classrooms, where they don’t get the full benefits that outdoor play can provide.
In Western states, extreme heat is increasingly keeping kids indoors, said Allison Poulos, a professor at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions. In one study conducted from July to September — the hottest months of the year in Arizona — her team found that kids were inside for recess about 40 percent of the time.
In colder areas, a variety of factors are at play. “We’ve heard a principal say he didn’t want the kids messing up the playground,” said Shanée Garner, executive director of Lift Every Voice Philly, a parent organizing group. “We’ve heard some folks say there’s no staffing. We’ve heard other folks say that the kids don’t get along with each other.”
When kids have recess inside instead of on the playground, they’re typically sedentary and often watching a movie, experts told me. In the Arizona study, kids who had recess in their classrooms were less ready to learn when lessons resumed than kids who actually got to play outside.
Now, families around the country are pushing for more outdoor time, and researchers are exploring ways that schools can get kids outside — or at least get them more active indoors — as the climate changes. These changes are necessary, advocates say, because without play, kids can’t learn.
“Recess is a very important period and time for children’s growth and development,” Poulos told me. “We have to be thinking of this and taking this seriously.”
Recess isn’t just a break from class; it’s also a time when kids practice the social and emotional skills they’ll need throughout their lives. During play, kids learn “how to collaborate, how to communicate, how to resolve conflict,” said Rebecca London, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has worked on recess research. They also learn emotion regulation: “If I lose a game, can I keep it together and keep playing?”
Free play is critical to children’s development, and for some kids, recess is “the only unstructured play they have any time in their day,” London said.
Recess in general suffered after the introduction of high-stakes testing with No Child Left Behind in 2001, as educators came to believe that kids needed as much instructional time as possible to increase test scores, London said. Average weekly recess time declined by 60 minutes between 2001 and 2019 to just 25 minutes a day.
A few states, like California, have passed laws setting a minimum amount of recess time for kids, but they don’t necessarily require that time to be spent outside. Meanwhile, as extreme heat becomes ever more common as a result of climate change, kids around the country are routinely facing temperatures over 100 degrees at recess time. Moreover, many playgrounds are exceptionally bad places to be when it’s very hot out; they often have minimal tree coverage and are made of materials like blacktop that can become dangerously hot to play on, Poulos said.
In many parts of the US, poor air quality from wildfires is also becoming an issue. In California, “there could be days or even weeks where kids cannot be outside because the air quality is so bad,” London said.
Unlike summer heat, winter temperatures are getting milder across much of the US. However, severe storms and unusual cold snaps are becoming more common, potentially disrupting kids’ outdoor time.
Temperature thresholds for outdoor recess vary from district to district, and it’s sometimes left up to individual school administrators to decide how cold is too cold. “I’ve been to places where the cutoff is 35 degrees, and I’ve been to places where the cutoff is 10 degrees,” London said.
Parents at some schools have complained that, even on mild winter days, kids aren’t getting outside. “There are constant excuses, whether it is too wet or students don’t have the right clothes,” one mom said during a school board meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts, last March.
Beyond the weather, schools sometimes struggle to recruit or train enough aides to supervise kids outside. Recess and lunch monitors “are some of the lowest paid folks in the entire school district,” Garner said.
Often, “the adults who are in charge of recess are not given any training, any support,” Cushing said. When recess monitors aren’t trained in conflict resolution and facilitating play, fights become more common, and schools may keep kids inside to limit the chaos.
But the lack of training and attention for recess staff is a symptom of a larger deprioritization of children’s fun and autonomy, some say. Schools have lost “an understanding that kids are going to play,” Garner said. Instead, “kids are expected to be managed.”
When kids are inside, that play is dramatically limited, experts say. Most elementary schools don’t have a gym, Poulos told me. Instead, they’re usually in their classrooms, where they miss out on movement, the chance to socialize with kids who aren’t in their class, and the opportunity to choose where they go and what they do.
“Indoor recess is not the same as outdoor recess,” London said.
Around the country, children in lower-income areas, cities, and districts that serve a higher percentage of families of color have less access to outdoor recess than their counterparts in more affluent, suburban, or predominantly white areas, London said. One 2019 investigation of Seattle public schools by KUOW came to a stark conclusion: “White kids typically get more recess. Black kids get less.”
But, advocates and researchers are working to make outdoor recess — or at least a reasonably active alternative — available to all kids. Some schools in colder areas have large shelters on their playgrounds to protect kids from rain, London said. Such shelters could also be constructed in hotter climates to provide shade.
Arizona State University has partnered with the city of Tempe and other groups to plant trees in schoolyards. Meanwhile, some schools are removing blacktop and replacing it with native plants or other ground cover. And if recess has to be indoors, principals have given students a bit more flexibility by designating certain classrooms for certain activities and allowing students to move between them, Poulos said.
Beyond facilities improvements, simple training for recess monitors can help reduce fights, Cushing said. Even something like having monitors use rock, paper, scissors to resolve disputes can help cut down on conflict.
When school leaders see the benefits of a well-run recess, including students who transition more quickly back to class, “they’re more likely to accept the drizzle,” Cushing said.
Others are pushing for policy change at the district level. In Philadelphia, Lift Every Voice has called for an end to 12 damaging practices in schools, including withholding recess.
For Garner, the issue is simple: “Kids are kids, and they should be treated like human beings, not like bots.”
Officials in Los Angeles say families’ fear of ICE raids is discouraging them from enrolling their children in school, contributing to a significant enrollment drop in the district.
The first year of the Trump administration has been devastating for education research, Jill Barshay writes for the Hechinger Report: “Rebuilding confidence in federal data — and recovering the institutional knowledge lost in a single chaotic year — will take far longer than the dismantling.”
The Easy-Bake Oven is back, apparently.
My little kid has been enjoying Ada Twist, Scientist, about a family coming to terms with their daughter’s passion for scientific exploration (which initially manifests as a desire to climb furniture and conduct experiments on the cat).
How do the kids in your life feel about recess? Do they wish it was longer? Do they get to play outside? Why is recess important to them? And what are your memories of recess as a kid? Let me know at [email protected].