By Richard Black, BBC News

媒體英語會帶大家一起學習BBC撰稿人在報道世界大事時常用到的單詞和短語。

Background: 生物學家多年來一直通過給企鵝做標記的方法來監(jiān)視企鵝的行蹤。法國科學家近日指出，此舉動不僅會給企鵝的健康帶來危害，而且還對已收集到的有關(guān)氣候變化的數(shù)據(jù)產(chǎn)生質(zhì)疑。

For decades scientists have been following penguins by putting bands around their flippers.

This allows individual birds to be identified at a distance.

But there have been concerns that flipper bands might harm the birds by slowing them down as they swim.

The latest study, reported in the journal Nature, confirms it. Scientists from Strasbourg University followed a colony of king penguins for ten years.

Birds fitted with bands died younger, started breeding later in the year, took longer to forage for food and over all raised about 40 per cent fewer chicks.

The researchers suggest that using flipper bands would now be unethical in most situations.

Scientists in the field would now have to find other tagging methods but in the meantime there are also concerns that some data gathered on penguins down the years, in this ecological crucial part of the planet, may now be worthless.