Diversity dependence is a ubiquitous phenomenon across Phanerozoic oceans

Abstract

Biodiversity on Earth is shaped by abiotic perturbations and rapid diversifications. At the same time, there are arguments that biodiversity is bounded and regulated via biotic interactions. Evaluating the role and relative strength of diversity regulation is crucial for interpreting the ongoing biodiversity changes. We have analyzed Phanerozoic fossil record using public databases and new approaches for identifying the causal dependence of origination and extinction rates on environmental variables and standing diversity. While the effect of environmental factors on origination and extinction rates is variable and taxon specific, the diversity dependence of the rates is almost universal across the studied taxa. Origination rates are dependent on instantaneous diversity levels, while extinction rates reveal delayed diversity dependence. Although precise mechanisms of diversity dependence may be complex and difficult to recover, global regulation of diversity via negative diversity dependence of lineage diversification seems to be a common feature of the biosphere, with profound consequences for understanding current biodiversity crisis.

Salinity plays a limited role in determining rates of size evolution in fishes globally across multiple scales

“…where speciation rate decreases as the number of species increases; e.g. Rabosky, 2013; Rineau et al . 2022) are either absent or simply do not impede higher phenotypic rates, highlighting them as good candidates for further study on this question.…”

Ecological structure of diversity-dependent diversification in Phanerozoic marine bivalves

“…However, diversity-dependent control of diversification by damping or promoting origination has been difficult to explain [10,57]. The most frequent hypothesis involves variations in the survival of incipient species [57,[68][69][70].…”

The equilibrium theory of biodiversity dynamics: a general framework for scaling species richness and community abundance along environmental gradients

“…Even when communities aren't at equilibrium, these attractors can shape biodiversity patterns in two ways. First, many communities appear to hover around equilibrium points, as suggested by accumulating evidence from macroecological and macroevolutionary analyses ( Rabosky 2009( Rabosky , 2022Rabosky and Hurlbert 2015;Storch and Okie 2019;Rineau et al 2022;Šímová et al 2023), which would lead to their average species richness being close to their equilibrium points. Secondly, following a major global-scale perturbation that pushes communities out of equilibrium, all-else-being-equal, the non-equilibrium communities with higher stable equilibria are more likely to have greater species richness than the non-equilibrium communities with lower stable equilibria, both because these communities have a greater "distance" to fall from and because the further a community is from a stable equilibrium point, the greater its rate of increase in diversity, leading to the high-equilibria community bouncing back to a higher richness more quickly.…”

“…This lack of consensus is in part due to the multitudinous factors at play but also due to the lack of general theoretical frameworks to test hypotheses and disentangle large-scale diversity drivers. Recently, evidence is accumulating that large-scale spatial diversity patterns tend to converge onto similar relationships with resource availability and climatic variables regardless of differences in diversification histories (Field et al 2009; Hawkins et al 2012; Rabosky 2022), and the origination and extinction rates underlying diversity dynamics exhibit a dependence on diversity (Rabosky 2009; Rineau et al 2022). These findings have been interpreted as evidence of the role of region or biome-specific ecological limits to species richness (Rabosky and Hurlbert 2015; Etienne et al 2019), but the nature of these limits has not been entirely clear.…”