Thursday, May 10, 2012

In extinction risk, there’s not always safety in numbers

Sam Fahmy at UGA Today (University of Georgia): A basic tenet underpinning scientists' understanding of extinction is that more abundant species persist longer than their less abundant counterparts, but a new University of Georgia study reveals a much more complex relationship.

A team of scientists analyzed more than 46,000 fossils from 52 sites and found that greater numbers did indeed help clam-like brachiopods survive the Ordovician extinction, which killed off approximately half of the Earth's life forms some 444 million years ago. Surprisingly, abundance did not help brachiopod species persist for extended periods outside of the extinction event.

Study co-author Steven Holland, a professor of geology in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, said the seemingly paradoxical finding suggests that predicting which species are at risk of extinction is an extremely dicey endeavor. This study shows that extinction is much more complicated than generally realized," said Holland, whose findings appear in the current issue of the journal Paleobiology. "It turns out that a lot of extinction events are idiosyncratic; there are a specific set of circumstances that come together and dictate whether something goes or doesn't."

Holland and co-author Andrew Zaffos, a former master's student at UGA, examined fossils from the Cincinnati Arch, a racetrack-shaped geologic feature that arcs around southeastern Indiana, northern Kentucky and southwestern Ohio. The region is known in geology circles as one of the most fossil-rich areas on the planet. Brachiopods are numerous and well preserved there, making them an ideal group of animals to test the link between abundance and extinction.

..."Many recent studies of extinction by paleobiologists are coming out with findings that are contrary to what we see in modern environments and sometimes even contrary to what other paleontologists see in other geologic eras," he said. "I think this is why paleobiology is so important-it's the only way for us to examine ecology at multiple points in the Earth's history, when perhaps the environmental and biological settings were different enough that even our most intuitive expectations don't hold."...

From Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 97: Spirobranchia

No comments: