Coral Reefs in Crisis: The Reliability of Deep-Time Food Web Reconstructions as Analogs for the Present

Roopnarine, Peter D.; Dineen, Ashley A.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-73795-9_6

Cited by 17 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 93 publications

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“…This suggestion has been theoretically validated repeatedly, with emphasis placed on community modularity, or the division of communities into sub-communities, where members of a sub-community interact with each other significantly more frequently than they do with species of other sub-communities (Guimera et al, 2010). Modularity has been demonstrated in modern communities (Krause et al 2003;Rezende et al 2009; Roopnarine and Dineen 2018; but see Wirta et al 2015), although Roopnarine and Dineen (2018) suggest that, at least for marine communities, modularity may be enhanced artificially by the anthropogenic extirpation of high trophic level predators. Those predators tend to reduce modularity by preying on species within multiple sub-communities.…”

Section: Functional Compartmentalization Increases Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The number of interspecific interactions of a species was determined randomly by assuming that the overall distribution of the number of prey per consumer (in-degree distribution) within a trophic guild or partition is hyperbolic, as commonly observed in modern food webs (Dunne et al, 2002;Roopnarine et al, 2007;Williams, 2010;Roopnarine, 2018). We used a mixed exponential-power law distribution, P(k) (Roopnarine, 2018), which has been shown to compensate statistically for trophic interactions that are lost during the fossilization of a food web (Roopnarine and Dineen, 2018).…”

Section: Paleocommunity Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ecological persistence, incumbency and reorganization in the Karoo Basin during the Permian-Triassic transition

Roopnarine¹,

Angielczyk²,

AllenWeik³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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The geological persistence of biotic assemblages and their reorganization or destruction by mass extinctions are key features of long-term macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns in the fossil record. These events affected biotic history disproportionately and left permanent imprints on global biodiversity. Here we hypothesize that the geological persistence and incumbency of paleocommunities and taxa aremaintained by patterns of biotic interactions that favour the ecological persistence and stable coexistence of interacting species. Equally complex communities produced by alternative macroevolutionary histories, and hence of different functional structure, may support less stable species coexistence, and are therefore less persistent. However, alternative communities with the same functional structure as a persistent paleocommunity, but variable clade richnesses, tend to be as or more stable than observed palecommunities, thus demonstrating that geological persistence is not the result of constrained patterns, or ecological locking. Numerically modeled food webs for seven tetrapod-dominated paleocommunities spanning thetraditionally-recognized Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa, show that incumbency before the Permian-Triassic mass extinction was maintained by a dynamically stable, community-level system of biotic interactions, thereby supporting the hypothesis. The system’s structure was lostthrough successive extinction pulses, and replaced initially by a rich but geologically ephemeral Early Triassic fauna, which itself was replaced by a novel Middle Triassic community with renewed incumbency.The loss of persistence and incumbency, therefore, did not result simply from the extinction of species; instead the largest declines were accompanied by the addition of new species to the system in the earliest aftermath of the event. We therefore further hypothesize that ecological reorganization and evolutionary innovation in the wake of mass extinctions play key roles in the destruction of highly stable, preexisting systems of biotic interaction. In the case of the Karoo Basin paleocommunities, we estimate that a return tostable interactions, and thus incumbency, was achieved in approximately 4-17 Ma.

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Section: Functional Compartmentalization Increases Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Paleocommunity Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological persistence, incumbency and reorganization in the Karoo Basin during the Permian-Triassic transition

Roopnarine¹,

Angielczyk²,

AllenWeik³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…Interactions between these guilds were inferred using extensive literature surveys of species life mode, feeding habits, functional morphology (e.g., feeding apparatus), habitat, species associations, and living analogue species (Steineck and Casey 1990;Frey 1995;Fortey and Owens 1999;Williams et al 2000;Rezende et al 2009; Arapov 2010; Bush and Bambach 2011; Stigall 2015). Trophic interactions have been similarly inferred in paleocommunities elsewhere (Dunne et al 2008(Dunne et al , 2014Roopnarine et al 2007;Mitchell et al 2012;Roopnarine 2018;Roopnarine and Dineen 2018). As the methodology for species aggregation into trophic guilds is consistent across pre-and postinvasion food webs, as are the types of organisms, any dissimilarities between the food webs should result from differences in species occurrences and structural differences between food webs.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…where trophic position is calculated for trophic guild i; r i is the number of consumer guilds; S is the number of trophic guilds in the food web; variable a ij is either 0 or 1, where 1 indicates that guild i preys upon guild j; and l j is the length of the shortest path of guild j to a primary producer guild (Roopnarine and Dineen 2018). Descriptive metrics were calculated using custom code written by C.L.T.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1. Fairview ECOSYSTEM DYNAMICS BEFORE AND AFTER RICHMONDIAN INVASION reliably record guild richness and evenness, trophic-level distribution, predator dietary breadth, food chain lengths, and modularity despite the preferential loss of soft-bodied taxa to poor preservation (i.e., reductions in species richness, and the number of interactions)(Roopnarine and Dineen 2018). Hierarchical clustering community detection methods were used to identify natural divisions within the food web into compartments…”

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confidence: 99%

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Comparisons of Late Ordovician ecosystem dynamics before and after the Richmondian invasion reveal consequences of invasive species in benthic marine paleocommunities

et al. 2020

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A thorough understanding of how communities respond to extreme changes, such as biotic invasions, is essential to manage ecosystems today. Here we constructed fossil food webs to identify changes in Late Ordovician (Katian) shallow-marine paleocommunity structure and functioning before and after the Richmondian invasion, a well-documented ancient invasion. Food webs were compared using descriptive metrics and cascading extinction on graphs models. Richness at intermediate trophic levels was underrepresented when using only data from the Paleobiology Database relative to museum collections, resulting in a spurious decrease in modeled paleocommunity stability. Therefore, museum collections and field sampling may provide more reliable sources of data for the reconstruction of trophic organization in comparison to online data repositories. The invasion resulted in several changes in ecosystem dynamics. Despite topological similarities between pre- and postinvasion food webs, species loss occurred corresponding to a minor decrease in functional groups. Invaders occupied all of the preinvasion functional guilds, with the exception of four incumbent guilds that were lost and one new guild, corroborating the notion that invaders replace incumbents and fill preexisting niche space. Overall, models exhibited strong resistance to secondary extinction, although the postinvasion community had a lower threshold of collapse and more variable response to perturbation. We interpret these changes in dynamics as a decrease in stability, despite similarities in overall structure. Changes in food web structure and functioning resulting from the invasion suggest that conservation efforts may need to focus on preserving functional diversity if more diverse ecosystems are not inherently more stable.

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Bottom-up controls, ecological revolutions and diversification in the oceans through time

Antell

Saupe

2021

Current Biology

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Animals originated in the oceans and evolved there for hundreds of millions of years before adapting to terrestrial environments. Today, oceans cover more than two-thirds of Earth and generate as much primary production as land. The path from the first macrobiota to modern marine biodiversity involved parallel increases in terrestrial nutrient input, marine primary production, species' abundance, metabolic rates, ecotypic diversity and taxonomic diversity. Bottom-up theories of ecosystem cascades arrange these changes in a causal sequence. At the base of marine food webs, nutrient fluxes and atmosphere-ocean chemistry interact with phytoplankton to regulate production. First-order consumers (e.g., zooplankton) might propagate changes in quantity and quality of phytoplankton to changes in abundance and diversity of larger predators (e.g., nekton). However, many uncertainties remain about the mechanisms and effect size of bottom-up control, particularly in oceans across the entire history of animal life. Here, we review modern and fossil evidence for hypothesized bottom-up pathways, and we assess the ramifications of these processes for four key intervals in marine ecosystems: the Ediacaran-Cambrian (635-485 million years ago), the Ordovician (485-444 million years ago), the Devonian (419-359 million years ago) and the Mesozoic (252-66 million years ago). We advocate for a clear articulation of bottom-up hypotheses to better understand causal relationships and proposed effects, combined with additional ecological experiments, paleontological documentation, isotope geochemistry and geophysical reconstructions. How small-scale ecological change transitions into large-scale evolutionary change remains an outstanding question for empirical and theoretical research.

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Coral Reefs in Crisis: The Reliability of Deep-Time Food Web Reconstructions as Analogs for the Present

Cited by 17 publications

References 93 publications

Ecological persistence, incumbency and reorganization in the Karoo Basin during the Permian-Triassic transition

Ecological persistence, incumbency and reorganization in the Karoo Basin during the Permian-Triassic transition

Comparisons of Late Ordovician ecosystem dynamics before and after the Richmondian invasion reveal consequences of invasive species in benthic marine paleocommunities

Bottom-up controls, ecological revolutions and diversification in the oceans through time

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