Mitchell, E. G and Bobkov, N and Bykova, N and Dhungana, A and Kolesnikov, A and Hogarth, IRP and Liu, A. G. and Mustill, TMR and Sozonov, N and Xiao, S and Grazhdankin, DV (2020) The influence of environmental setting on the community ecology of Ediacaran organisms. Interface Focus. ISSN 2042-8901 print 2042-8898 (In Press)
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Abstract
The broad-scale environment plays a substantial role in shaping modern marine ecosystems, but the degree to which palaeocommunities were influenced by their environment is unclear. To investigate how broad-scale environment influenced the community ecology of early animal ecosystems we employed spatial point process analyses to examine the community structure of seven bedding-plane assemblages of late Ediacaran age (558–550 Ma), drawn from a range of environmental settings and global localities. The studied palaeocommunities exhibit marked differences in the response of their component taxa to sub-metre-scale habitat heterogeneities on the seafloor. Shallow-marine palaeocommunities were heavily influenced by local habitat heterogeneities, in contrast to their deep-water counterparts. Lower species richness in deep-water Ediacaran assemblages compared to shallow-water counterparts across the studied time-interval could have been driven by this environmental patchiness, because habitat heterogeneities correspond to higher diversity in modern marine environments. The presence of grazers and detritivores within shallow-water communities may have promoted local patchiness, potentially initiating a chain of increasing heterogeneity of benthic communities from shallow to deep-marine depositional environments. Our results provide quantitative support for the “Savannah” hypothesis for early animal diversification – whereby Ediacaran diversification was driven by patchiness in the local benthic environment.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | 2020AREP; IA76 |
| Subjects: | 04 - Palaeobiology |
| Divisions: | 04 - Palaeobiology 06 - Part-III Projects 08 - Green Open Access |
| Journal or Publication Title: | Interface Focus |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Humbert |
| Date Deposited: | 07 May 2020 23:03 |
| Last Modified: | 07 May 2020 23:03 |
| URI: | http://eprints.esc.cam.ac.uk/id/eprint/4735 |
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