Print PageSpores of Sporormiella, a fungus commonly found on the dung of domestic and extinct herbivores also occurs in pollen cores, and will appear on slides following standard pollen processing. Spores are readily counted as part of routine pollen analysis, so additional information may be gathered from existing processed cores to infer the presence of large animals in prehistoric time. Using new microfossil records from the southern New York/northern New Jersey region we evaluate Sporormiella as a proxy for megafaunal presence. Is the representation of Sporormiella in these records solely affected by large herbivore presence? Or are Sporormiella values affected by environmental preservation conditions such as temperature, water level, and hydrology? To address these questions, we look at several cores to evaluate trends in pollen types associated with warmer or cooler climate, wetland and aquatic environments. Our records include both the late Pleistocene and late Holocene, to test for the representation of Sporormiella spores following the introduction of cattle with European settlement.
Results/Conclusions
We find that abundance of Sporormiella does not correlate with indicators of water level or hydrology, such as pollen or macrofossils of aquatic and wetland plants, suggesting that water levels are not affecting the representation of the fungal spores in these wetland sedimentary records. Furthermore, there is no correlation between Sporormiella and the pollen record of Cyperaceae, a family that comprises both wetland and terrestrial species. Records that include both late Pleistocene and historical sediments show Sporormiella spores are abundant prior to the Younger Dryas cooling event followed by a decline; they reappear corresponding to the 17th Century introduction of cattle into the lowlands. The decline and re-appearance of Sporormiella in these records suggests that it is broadly sensitive to the presence of large animals at a local level.
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