Research & Lab news – Page 2

What drives change in the seas?

Posted on December 12, 2012September 9, 2014 by Aaron in Macroevolution

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….

Extinctions in ancient and modern seas

Posted on November 2, 2012January 8, 2013 by Aaron in Historical Ecology, Macroevolution

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.

Cenozoic seawater Sr/Ca evolution

Posted on August 2, 2012December 27, 2013 by Aaron in Paleoenvironments

Records of seawater chemistry help constrain temporal variations in geochemical processes that impact the global carbon cycle and climate through Earth’s history. Here we reconstruct Cenozoic seawater Sr/Ca using fossil Conus and turritellid gastropods.

Our favored seawater Sr/Ca scenarios point to a significant increase in the proportion of aragonite versus calcite deposition in shelf sediments from the Middle Miocene, coincident with the proliferation of coral reefs. We propose that this occurred at least 10 million years after the seawater Mg/Ca threshold was passed, and was instead aided by declining levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Pdf of the paper available by clicking on these images of cone shells…

c_litteratus1472 — image from http://www.coneshell.net

Integrating fossils and molecules

Posted on December 31, 2011June 8, 2017 by Aaron in Macroevolution, Paleoenvironments

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” →

Corrosive concoctions

Posted on December 22, 2011June 8, 2017 by Aaron in Biology and ecology

Rising ocean temperatures and ocean acidity may deliver a deadly one-two punch to the world’s corals. Holger Anlauf placed coral larvae and young corals under four controlled culture conditions: (1) increased temperatures (2) increased acidity (3) combination of Continue reading “Corrosive concoctions” →

A review of the zooid size MART approach

Posted on November 2, 2011September 9, 2014 by Aaron in Oceanography, Paleoenvironments

As a PhD student I devised and developed a completely new technique for investigating paleoseasonality. Reconstructions of paleoenvironments often fail to understand the importance of the mean annual range of temperature (MART) in both oceanographic and biological contexts. The new technique, called the ‘zooid size approach’ makes use of the temperature-size rule in colonial bryozoans to estimate MART. The temperature-size rule is a universal phenomenon that states that body size decreases as temperature increases.

At the time, our understanding of the temperature-size rule was rudimentary and it was necessary to develop hypotheses on the mechanisms behind the rule and then test them under controlled culture and natural experiments, before finally applying the approach to fossil bryozoans to estimate MART’s in ancient seas.

The original paper published in 2000 presenting the technique can be downloaded here.

Now 10 years later with my ex-Phd supervisor Beth Okamura we review the approach along with the growing body of work that has since been published on the theme. We consider the general issue of why body size varies with temperature, explore the limitations of the approach and highlight its advantages relative to other proxies for palaeotemperature inferences.

Download the pdf of this new paper by clicking on the image.

What happened at the end of the Cretaceous?

Posted on October 23, 2011January 1, 2013 by Aaron in Macroevolution, Paleoenvironments

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.

Sex in the Caribbean

Posted on March 31, 2010September 9, 2014 by Aaron in Macroevolution

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.

Hopping hotspots

Posted on November 30, 2008January 1, 2013 by Aaron in Macroevolution

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.

Form and life habit in cupuladriids

Posted on February 26, 2008January 1, 2013 by Aaron in Biology and ecology, Macroevolution

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.

Upwelling in the Tropical Eastern Pacific

Posted on December 3, 2007February 4, 2013 by Aaron in Biology and ecology, Oceanography

Most people think Panama has two seas – the Caribbean and the Pacific. In fact it has three and they are each very distinct. This paper presents detailed hydrological measurements from the two seas along the Pacific coast of Panama: the Gulf of Panama and the Gulf of Chiriqui, and characterizes the environmental differences between them. Click on the image for the pdf of the paper.

Delayed extinctions

Posted on December 3, 2007January 1, 2013 by Aaron in Macroevolution

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

Investigating palaeoseasonality

Posted on November 3, 2007January 3, 2013 by Aaron in Paleoenvironments

A full understanding of any climate requires an appreciation of the amount of seasonal variation in temperature. This is important not only for present-day climatology but also for investigation of ancient environments. In this paper I present a novel approach to reveal how seasonal an ancient sea was by measuring the amount of variation in zooid size within colonies of fossil cheilostome bryozoans.

Click on the image for the pdf…