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Dynamic response of Permian brachiopod communities to long-term environmental change

Nature volume 428, pages 738–741 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

The fossil record preserves numerous natural experiments that can shed light on the response of ecological communities to environmental change. However, directly observing the community dynamics of extinct organisms is not possible. As an alternative, neutral ecological models1,2,3 suggest that species abundance distributions reflect dynamical processes like migration, competition, recruitment, and extinction. Live–dead comparisons suggest that such distributions can be faithfully preserved in the rock record4. Here we use a maximum-likelihood approach to show that brachiopod (lamp shell) abundance distributions from four temporally distinct ecological landscapes from the Glass Mountains, Texas (of the Permian period), exhibit significant differences. Further, all four are better fitted by zero-sum multinomial distributions, characteristic of Hubbell's neutral model2, than by log-normal distributions, as predicted by the traditional ecological null hypothesis5. Using the neutral model as a guide, we suggest that sea level fluctuations spanning about 10 Myr altered the degrees of isolation and exchange among local communities within these ecological landscapes. Neither these long-term environmental changes nor higher-frequency sea level fluctuations resulted in wholesale extinction or major innovation within evolutionary lineages.

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Figure 1: Stratigraphic column and location map.
Figure 2: Abundance distributions of species from each sequence.
Figure 3: 95% confidence boundaries of maximum-likelihood zero-sum multinomial parameters for each sequence.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. I. Miller and M. Foote for comments.This research was supported by the Walcott Fund of the Department of Paleobiology of the Smithsonian Institution and the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology and Geophysics, 3115 TAMU, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77843, USA

    Thomas D. Olszewski

  2. Department of Paleobiology MRC-121, Smithsonian Institution, NMNH, Washington, DC, 20013, USA

    Douglas H. Erwin

  3. Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, 87501, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

    Douglas H. Erwin

Authors
  1. Thomas D. Olszewski
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Correspondence to Thomas D. Olszewski.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Includes information on: ecological relationships among sequences; the effect of combining communities over evolutionary timescales. (PDF 116 kb)

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Olszewski, T., Erwin, D. Dynamic response of Permian brachiopod communities to long-term environmental change. Nature 428, 738–741 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02464

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