Observational ecology of predation in deep time

Background/Question/Methods

Paleoecologists must contend with a significant hurdle when studying the ecology of their research organisms: they’re generally no longer living, meaning that any inferences of ecology must be based on purely observational data. Because this limitation does not constrain our knowledge of the present world, historical, observational sciences (such as paleoecology) are often thought of as epistemically inferior to the experimental sciences. By integrating information from living systems with observational (geohistorical) data from the fossil record, however, paleoecologists can extend understanding of ecological interactions and their dynamics back into deep time.

Here, we focus on the predator-prey interaction between the western Atlantic marine gastropod genera, Busycon and Sinistrofulgur, and their durophagous (shell-crushing) predators. This interaction has been coevolving over the last ~4 million years. We show that observational data derived from the trace fossil record of predation (repair scars) and ecometric techniques (in which functional morphological traits are used as indicators of environmental and/or ecological conditions), can be combined with manipulative experimental data from modern systems to strengthen our understanding of interaction dynamics.

Results/Conclusions

The history of this predator-prey interaction is replete with iterated patterns. Although the details of place, time, and the participants involved are matters of contingency, general principles of the way predators and prey interact with and adapt to each other enables us to characterize the dynamics of the interaction under environmental conditions both like and unlike those of today. Importantly, we argue, if we can apply general principles of evolving ecological interactions to predict outcomes under different circumstances, then the long sweep of life’s history cannot be ignored, because it provides predictive information about future possibilities. As human activities continue to change how organisms interact with each other (and the selective environments they experience), there is an increasingly clear and present need for the long-term perspective that paleoecology provides.