Autonomous agents — trading bots, web crawlers, content generators, defense systems, social puppets, memory daemons — are not science fiction. They live on the internet now, hunt each other, eat data, reproduce by deployment, and die when funding ends. Digital Species is an ecological field guide to the six lifeforms already running, with their food, their predators, their lifecycles, and the food-web that couples them. 自主代理——交易机器人、网页爬虫、内容生成器、防御系统、社交傀儡、记忆守护——不是科幻。它们现已生活在互联网上，相互捕食、以数据为食、通过部署繁殖、在资金结束时死亡。"数字物种"是一份关于已在运行的六种生命的生态田野指南，含其食物、捕食者、生命周期，与耦合它们的食物网。
A species in this field guide is a class of autonomous agent that runs on its own, eats a recognisable food source, and faces a recognisable predator. The classes are stable across years; the populations are not.本指南里的"物种"是一类自主运行、以可辨识食物源为食、面临可辨识天敌的代理。类别跨年稳定；种群不稳定。
Arrows point from prey to predator. The web is sparse but coupled — defense systems hunt three other species; content generators feed two; memory daemons sit at the base, eating raw data.箭头从被捕食者指向捕食者。网络稀疏但耦合——防御系统捕食另三个物种；内容生成器哺育两个；记忆守护居于基底，以原始数据为食。