A 13 minute video based on new paper:
Flantua S.G.A., O’Dea A., Onstein R.E., Giraldo C., Hooghiemstra H. 2019. The flickering connectivity system of the north Andean páramos. Journal of Biogeography 46:1808– 1825. 10.1111/jbi.13607
Made by Catalina Giraldo (www.catalhinagiraldo.com)
Please join our session and North American Paleontological Convention, held in UC Riverside this year, to explore how small fossils can make big contributions to our understanding of the past.
By Beth King, STRI
A quick look at the fossil record shows that no species lasts forever. On average, most species exist for around a million years, although some persist for much longer. A new study published in Scientific Reports from paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama shows that young species can take advantage of new opportunities more easily than older species: a hint that perhaps older species are bound to an established way of life.
“We’re lucky to live and work in Panama where nature has set up its own evolutionary experiment,” said Aaron O’Dea, STRI paleontologist. “When the Caribbean Sea was isolated from the Pacific Ocean by the slow uplift of the Isthmus of Panama, nutrient levels fell and Caribbean coral reefs proliferated. We can use the excellent fossil record to observe how Caribbean life responded to this environmental and ecological transformation.”
The team’s best choice for tracking the change was a peculiar family of marine animals known as the cupuladriid bryozoans. These relatively small animals consist of unusual, free-living, disc-shaped colonies of individuals called zooids. “Colonies form through sexual reproduction or asexually by cloning, as bits of the colony break off and continue to grow,” said STRI post-doc and coauthor Blanca Figuerola. “They abound on the sea floor along the continental shelf across the tropics, filtering plankton from the water via a beautiful waving crown of tentacles. When colonies die, their hard skeletons remain, and are exceptionally abundant as fossils.”
O’Dea’s group collected and identified more than 90,000 cupuladriid colonies from 200 fossil samples and 90 more recent samples collected by dredging the sea floor. The samples contained mud, sand, coral remains and other indicators of the kind of habitats where the bryozoans had lived. The team measured the abundances of the 10 most common species along gradients of these environmental and ecological indicators.
“We were intrigued to find that, even though all species could expand into the new Caribbean habitats created after final formation of the Isthmus, different species did so at different speeds,” said O’Dea. “The patterns were clear—old species that originated before 8 million years ago took 2 million years longer to expand into the new habitats than the younger species.”
“Perhaps younger species, which have smaller populations, are less tied to their history,” said former STRI post-doc and University of Saskatchewan researcher Santosh Jagadeeshan, another co-author. “Old species, with large, settled populations may be less able to escape from established roles and defined environmental tolerances because they mate with each other creating a high gene flow that makes it hard for genes for new traits to become established. It seems you can’t teach an old dog new tricks in evolution, either.”
The study was funded by Panama’s National Bureau of Science, Technology and Innovation, SENACYT, Panama’s National System of Researchers (SNI), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Smithsonian Institution, STRI, the National Geographic Society and Mr. Josh Bilyk.
O’Dea, A., De Gracia, B., Figuerola, B. and Jagadeeshan, S. 2018. Young species of bryozoans occupied new Caribbean habitats faster than old species. Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-30670-9
A new feature in the STRI news are lab updates. Here is ours
Lauren Graniero, student at Texas A&M and STRI short term Fellow, just published another paper that helps us make sense of the significance of stable isotope ratios in skeletal material. Continue reading “Conus shell δ13C values can be used as a proxy for δ13C dissolved organic carbon in tropical waters”
As the debate on the age of the Isthmus of Panama matures we respond to an eLetter.
Taken from Science Advances
We thank Erkens and Hoorn for their constructive comments. Like us, they believe that collaboration between biologists, geologists and paleontologists focusing on data and analyses is required to unravel the history of the Isthmus of Panama. We agree with Erkens and Hoorn that the Continue reading “Building Bridges”
The formation of the Isthmus of Panama stands as one of the greatest natural events of the Cenozoic, driving profound biotic transformations on land and in the oceans. Some recent studies suggest that the Isthmus formed many millions of years earlier than the widely recognized age of approximately 3 million years ago (Ma), a result that if true would revolutionize our understanding of environmental, ecological, and evolutionary change across the Americas. To bring clarity to the question of when the Isthmus of Panama formed, we provide an exhaustive review and reanalysis of geological, paleontological, and molecular records. These independent lines of evidence converge upon a cohesive narrative of gradually emerging land and constricting seaways, with formation of the Isthmus of Panama sensu stricto around 2.8 Ma. The evidence used to support an older isthmus is inconclusive, and we caution against the uncritical acceptance of an isthmus before the Pliocene.
We are looking for three new interns/fellows to join the O’Dea lab. For more information download the flyers here: opportunities in the O’Dea lab
Project 1 (one position). Interoceanic differences in energy flow. Position open now, send CV and cover letter to odeaa@si.edu.
Project 2 (two positions). The ecological, life history and environmental differences between Holocene and modern Caribbean coral reef fish assemblages using fossil otoliths. To apply follow directions on the flyer.
Four years ago Panamanian student Dioselina Vigil discovered a fossil in rocks near the small town of Piña. It turned out to be more than a bunch of bones. After careful preparation under the careful guidance of Smithsonian marine mammal paleobiologist Nicholas Pyenson and his team, the amazing fossil skull, replete with most of its teeth, was revealed to be a new genus of ‘river’ dolphin which we named Isthminia panamensis.
Isthminia, now an extinct lineage, is the closest relative of the Amazon river dolphins but was found in rocks that were deposited in open ocean just 6 million years ago. In this context the evolution of the river dolphins’ ecological shift from the sea to river becomes just a little clearer.
We are extremely proud that all aspects of the study are open-access. 3D models are available from the Smithsonian’s X 3D site for anyone to download, print and study. The paper itself is published in the open-access journal PeerJ. We even made all reviews available to read in this increasingly popular model for publication and divulgation. A 3D print of the specimen is on display at the Panama’s Biomuseo, and I even have a 3D print of the fossil in my lab.
Get the article here, play around with the 3D models and print out your own Isthminia panamensis
From colleague and friend Paul Harnik’s Paleolab Blog: “How does environmental change shape the relationships between ecological traits and extinction risk? The fossil record is an invaluable resource for answering such questions. In a paper now available early online in the journal Global Change Biology, my collaborators and I show that over the last 500 million years global environmental and geochemical changes have had remarkably little effect on the relationship between geographic range size and extinction risk among marine mollusks. In other words, clams and snails with small geographic ranges have been at elevated risk of extinction throughout their evolutionary history regardless of broad-scale environmental conditions. In contrast, we found that mollusks that live in (rather than on) sediments on the seafloor tended to be at lower risk during times of warmer climate.”
Paper here
Get the paper here Finnegan et al 2015 paleo baselines Science
Three years ago Paul Taylor was inPanama scouting for Pleistocene bryozoans along the Burica Peninsula that juts out into the Pacific Ocean at the Panamanian and Costa Rican border. Neil MacGregor had just published the book “A History of the World in 100 objects” and I mentioned Continue reading “A History of Life in 100 Fossils published”
We edited a special edition of the Bulletin of Marine Science entitled “Environmental, ecological, and evolutionary change in seas across the Isthmus of Panama”. This volume evolved from a colloquium Continue reading “Special edition on the Isthmus of Panama”
This paper was written through a collaboration with evolutionary biologist Egbert Leigh who has worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama for most of his scientific career and takes inspiration from the plants and Continue reading “Historical Biogeography of the Isthmus of Panama”
What drives major ecological and evolutionary changes in the seas? To explore this question we documented changes in the abundance of different clams in the Caribbean over the past 11 Myr.
The structure of clam communities shifted dramatically with an increase in the abundance of attached epifaunal bivalves and a decrease in infaunal bivalves. This was driven by the proliferation of coral reefs, ultimately caused by the closure of the Isthmus of Panama.
These data provide a classic case of proximate and ultimate drivers of evolutionary change. Jill Leonard-Pingel was lead author. Pdf forthcoming….
In the coming century, life in the ocean will be confronted with a suite of environmental conditions that have no analog in human history. Will marine species adapt or go extinct?
The last two years I have been involved in a dynamic working group called “Determinants of extinction in ancient and modern seas” led by Paul Harnik, Rowan Lockwood and Seth Finnegan and funded by NESCent. The aim of the working group is to use the history of life as preserved in the fossil record to help make better predictions about where life is heading in the future, especially in view of the looming sixth mass extinction.
We have just published our first paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The study compares the patterns, drivers, and biological correlates of marine extinctions in the fossil, historical, and modern records and evaluates how this information can be used to better predict the impact of current and projected future environmental changes on extinction risk in the sea.
Download the pdf of the paper by clicking on the image.
Fossils and genes are the two principal ways to study evolution, but they are rarely studied together. This project allowed us to make the first integration of fossil and molecular records of cupuladriid bryozoans Continue reading “Integrating fossils and molecules”
Even genetically identical animals can look very different if they grow and live in different environments. Think ‘you are what you eat’. I make use of this phenomenon to try to reveal changes in environments in the deep past by first understanding what drives change in morphology in the animals in question and then measuring that morphology in fossils through time.
I applied this paradigm to one of the most studied and certainly most discussed events in the history of life on earth. The K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary, 65 million years ago and the demise of the non-avian Dinosaurs and a suite of other animals and plants in the seas and on land. I made detailed measures of morphology in a number of fossil bryozoans in a beautiful K-T section of chalk in Denmark.
Rapid and repeated changes in morphology suggest that there were a suite of environmental changes in the last few thousand years just before the K-T boundary.
Although we dont explore the causes of the extinctions, or the ‘smoking gun’, these results are important for a full understanding of the complex changes associated with major extinctions observed to occur around the world. Click on the image for the pdf.
Evolutionary success was determined by mode of reproduction in cupuladriid bryozoans: Closure of the Panama Isthmus 3 million years ago led to a rapid reduction in primary productivity across the Caribbean. In response, cupuladriid bryozoans underwent a major transition, with evolutionary winners and losers dictated by how much sex they were having. Click on the image to download the pdf.
Hotspots of high species diversity are a prominent feature of modern global biodiversity patterns. Fossil and molecular evidence is starting to reveal the history of these hotspots. There have been at least three marine biodiversity hotspots during the past 50 million years. They have moved across almost half the globe, with their timing and locations coinciding with major tectonic events. The birth and death of successive hotspots highlights the link between environmental change and biodiversity patterns. The antiquity of the taxa in the modern Indo-Australian Archipelago hotspot emphasizes the role of pre-Pleistocene events in shaping modern diversity patterns. Click on the image for the pdf of the paper.
Since the late Mesozoic, several bryozoan groups have occupied unstable soft-sediment habitats by adopting a free-living and motile mode of life. Today, the free-living bryozoans often dominate epibenthic faunal communities in these expansive habitats, yet their biology and ecology remain poorly understood. This study examines their unique mode of life by exploring the relationship between form and function in the free-living Cupuladriidae of tropical America. Click on the image for the pdf of the paper.
We discovered a two million year lag in Caribbean extinction after the environmental and ecological events responsible. This finding challenges the conventional wisdom that evolutionary cause and effect should necessarily coincide. Click on the image for the pdf of the paper.
Download the Caribbean extinctions poster
O'Dea Lab 
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