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Study explores ancient ecosystem response to a “big five” mass extinction, calls for modern food web
https://www.calacademy.org/press/releases/study-explores-ancient-ecosystem-response-to-a-%E2%80%9Cbig-five%E2%80%9D-mass-extinction-calls-for[font face=Serif][font size=5]Study explores ancient ecosystem response to a “big five” mass extinction, calls for modern food web research[/font]
[font size=4]Ingenious modeling shows that the stability of ancient ecosystems depended on species with important, big-picture roles in food web[/font]
[font size=3]SAN FRANCISCO (October 1, 2015)—As the planet faces the dawn of a sixth mass extinction, scientists are searching for clues about the uncertain road ahead by exploring how ancient ecosystems collapsed and bounced back from traumatic upheavals. A new study follows the lengthy collapses and revival of South African ecosystems during one of the “big five” mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic event, revealing unexpected results about the types of animals that were most vulnerable to extinction, and the factors that might best predict community stability during times of great change. The study’s authors—including Peter Roopnarine, PhD, of the California Academy of Sciences—say inventive, cutting-edge modeling techniques helped highlight the critical importance of understanding food webs (knowing “who eats what”) when trying to predict what communities look like before, during, and after a mass extinction. The thought-provoking study is the first of its kind, and is published today in Science.
“Vital clues” in deep time
“There is no real precedent for what’s happening to our planet at the moment,” says Roopnarine, who co-authored the study with Kenneth Angielczyk, PhD, of Chicago’s Field Museum. “We can’t look into recent history and find this particular cocktail of accelerated climate change, habitat destruction, and global extinction. We can, however, explore instances of extreme crises in the fossil record—looking far back in time to reconstruct what happened, and how ecosystems responded.”
As Curator of Geology, Roopnarine is accustomed to thinking in “deep time”—a geologic reference to the vast, multimillion-year timeframe some scientists use to unravel mysteries from Earth’s pre-human existence. Past extinctions and climate perturbations may lack the human factors driving today’s phenomena, but Roopnarine says those periods “contain vital clues” about the ways natural communities respond to crises and rebuild.
“The challenge with researching extinctions that happened more than 200 million years ago is that there is not enough fossil or other geological evidence to recreate a perfectly complete ecosystem,” says Roopnarine. “It’s a bit like knowing a long, complex experiment—a mass extinction—was conducted, but nobody took notes. That’s where the reconstruction and modeling comes in.”
...[/font][/font]
[font size=4]Ingenious modeling shows that the stability of ancient ecosystems depended on species with important, big-picture roles in food web[/font]
[font size=3]SAN FRANCISCO (October 1, 2015)—As the planet faces the dawn of a sixth mass extinction, scientists are searching for clues about the uncertain road ahead by exploring how ancient ecosystems collapsed and bounced back from traumatic upheavals. A new study follows the lengthy collapses and revival of South African ecosystems during one of the “big five” mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic event, revealing unexpected results about the types of animals that were most vulnerable to extinction, and the factors that might best predict community stability during times of great change. The study’s authors—including Peter Roopnarine, PhD, of the California Academy of Sciences—say inventive, cutting-edge modeling techniques helped highlight the critical importance of understanding food webs (knowing “who eats what”) when trying to predict what communities look like before, during, and after a mass extinction. The thought-provoking study is the first of its kind, and is published today in Science.
“Vital clues” in deep time
“There is no real precedent for what’s happening to our planet at the moment,” says Roopnarine, who co-authored the study with Kenneth Angielczyk, PhD, of Chicago’s Field Museum. “We can’t look into recent history and find this particular cocktail of accelerated climate change, habitat destruction, and global extinction. We can, however, explore instances of extreme crises in the fossil record—looking far back in time to reconstruct what happened, and how ecosystems responded.”
As Curator of Geology, Roopnarine is accustomed to thinking in “deep time”—a geologic reference to the vast, multimillion-year timeframe some scientists use to unravel mysteries from Earth’s pre-human existence. Past extinctions and climate perturbations may lack the human factors driving today’s phenomena, but Roopnarine says those periods “contain vital clues” about the ways natural communities respond to crises and rebuild.
“The challenge with researching extinctions that happened more than 200 million years ago is that there is not enough fossil or other geological evidence to recreate a perfectly complete ecosystem,” says Roopnarine. “It’s a bit like knowing a long, complex experiment—a mass extinction—was conducted, but nobody took notes. That’s where the reconstruction and modeling comes in.”
...[/font][/font]
