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Late Cenozoic cooling restructured global marine plankton communities

Nature volume 614, pages 713–718 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The geographic ranges of marine organisms, including planktonic foraminifera1, diatoms, dinoflagellates2, copepods3 and fish4, are shifting polewards owing to anthropogenic climate change5. However, the extent to which species will move and whether these poleward range shifts represent precursor signals that lead to extinction is unclear6. Understanding the development of marine biodiversity patterns over geological time and the factors that influence them are key to contextualizing these current trends. The fossil record of the macroperforate planktonic foraminifera provides a rich and phylogenetically resolved dataset that provides unique opportunities for understanding marine biogeography dynamics and how species distributions have responded to ancient climate changes. Here we apply a bipartite network approach to quantify group diversity, latitudinal specialization and latitudinal equitability for planktonic foraminifera over the past eight million years using Triton, a recently developed high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminiferal occurrences7. The results depict a global, clade-wide shift towards the Equator in ecological and morphological community equitability over the past eight million years in response to temperature changes during the late Cenozoic bipolar ice sheet formation. Collectively, the Triton data indicate the presence of a latitudinal equitability gradient among planktonic foraminiferal functional groups which is coupled to the latitudinal biodiversity gradient only through the geologically recent past (the past two million years). Before this time, latitudinal equitability gradients indicate that higher latitudes promoted community equitability across ecological and morphological groups. Observed range shifts among marine planktonic microorganisms1,2,8 in the recent and geological past suggest substantial poleward expansion of marine communities even under the most conservative future global warming scenarios.

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Fig. 1: Planktonic foraminiferal ecogroups.
Fig. 2: Late Cenozoic climate, specialization indices, and richness.
Fig. 3: Changes in low-ESI zones over the past 8 Myr.

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Data availability

All data were sourced from the Triton dataset7 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00942-7).

Code availability

The code used to perform all analyses is available at https://github.com/anshuman21111/foram-networks.

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Acknowledgements

A.W. and C.M.L. were supported by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, A.S. and W.F.F. were supported by the University of Maryland (UMD) and A.J.F. receives funding from NSERC through DGECR-2022-00141 and RGPIN-2022-03305. A.S. additionally acknowledges training and technical support from the COMBINE programme at UMD, the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF), and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. The authors thank the University of Leeds; the creators of the Triton dataset (to which A.W. also contributed): I. Fenton, T. Aze, D. Lazarus, J. Renaudie, A. Dunhill, J. Young and E. Saupe; the International Ocean Discovery Program, and all predecessor scientific ocean drilling programmes and staff;  and P. Pearson, B. Huber, J. Partin, S. D’Hondt and M. Leckie for scientific discussion of the manuscript.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Adam Woodhouse, Anshuman Swain

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Adam Woodhouse & Christopher M. Lowery

  2. Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Anshuman Swain & William F. Fagan

  3. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Anshuman Swain

  4. Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Anshuman Swain

  5. Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, USA

    Anshuman Swain

  6. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Andrew J. Fraass

  7. Invertebrate Paleontology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Andrew J. Fraass

  8. School of Earth Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Andrew J. Fraass

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Contributions

A.W. and A.S. formulated the study, generated the data and performed the analyses. All authors contributed to the interpretation of data. A.W. and A.S. conceived and plotted the figures. A.S. wrote the code to perform analyses. All authors contributed to the writing and editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Adam Woodhouse.

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Woodhouse, A., Swain, A., Fagan, W.F. et al. Late Cenozoic cooling restructured global marine plankton communities. Nature 614, 713–718 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05694-5

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