As hunters and gatherers, humans have always exploited a wide variety of natural resources. Hunting, in particular, focuses upon individual species. The relationships between human and game are most often seen as isolated entities, for example, human–bison, human–whale, human–seabird or human–mammoth. However, hunting interactions are embedded in large and complex ecological networks. Seabirds such as the common eider (Somateria mollissima) have been and are still being hunted by both indigenous people of the Arctic and Europeans. Due to anthropogenic pressures, including hunting, several common eider populations have declined during the 20th century, even as much as up to 10-fold. Here, we review the ecological role of the common eider in Arctic networks and the diversity of human–eider interactions, underlining its importance for both humans and nonhumans. We place these interactions in a wider ecological context and discuss how human activities affecting eiders propagate through the Arctic ecological network and can cause far-reaching ecological effects.

中文翻译：

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绒鸭作为北极网络中的长距离连接器

作为猎人和采集者，人类一直在开发各种各样的自然资源。狩猎尤其关注个体物种。人类与游戏之间的关系通常被视为孤立的实体，例如，人-野牛、人-鲸、人-海鸟或人-猛犸象。然而，狩猎互动嵌入在庞大而复杂的生态网络中。海鸟，例如普通绒鸭 (Somateria mollissima) 已经并且仍在被北极土著人和欧洲人猎杀。由于包括狩猎在内的人为压力，一些常见的绒毛种群在 20 世纪下降了，甚至下降了 10 倍。在这里，我们回顾了普通绒毛在北极网络中的生态作用以及人与绒毛互动的多样性，强调其对人类和非人类的重要性。我们将这些相互作用置于更广泛的生态环境中，并讨论影响绒鸭的人类活动如何通过北极生态网络传播并可能产生深远的生态影响。