What a complicated web we spin. We clearly didn’t know half of what the climate catastrophe has done to the marine food webs. According to a recent UNLV study that analyzed ancient and contemporary ocean ecosystems in an effort to learn how to improve their health and resilience.
Oceanic food webs, according to some experts, haven’t changed all that much in the last 540 million years. Researchers at UNLV have discovered that some ancient food webs were actually significantly dissimilar from modern ones.
The study, which was published in the most recent issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, used fossils to recreate four separate marine food webs from the time more than 65 million years ago when dinosaurs ruled the globe. The food webs were also contrasted with one that was recreated from a contemporary Jamaican reef.
The result? The four prehistoric food webs were very different from one another, and the youngest one did not resemble the coral reefs found now in Jamaica the most.
Since they first evolved, marine ecosystems have undergone significant structural changes, according to researchers. When considering conservation and restoration plans, damage to these structures over time caused by humans can impact the capacity to correct imbalances and prevent the extinction of the species living there.
“Learning how food webs work is very important for conservation because it helps scientists predict how ecosystems will respond to climate change,” said study co-author Carrie Tyler, a marine conservation paleobiologist and assistant professor in the UNLV department of geoscience.
“There is an interconnectedness and dependency between each member, which means when a stressor affects one species, it will ultimately affect the rest of the web,” she said. “If a species is removed from the structure, the function in the food web may no longer be fulfilled because of the missing piece.”
Tyler said this can make it difficult to reintroduce species down the road, as their functions may no longer fit into the structure. “Using paleontology in this way can help us understand what we should be saving and how to save it, giving us another way to look at conservation efforts.”
Added Roxanne Banker, a UNLV postdoctoral researcher working with Tyler: “By studying these structures over time, we can find ways to promote more resilient communities now, and in the future.”
Takeaways
- Climate change and altered ocean ecosystems due to human activity are of increasing concern. “No pristine ecosystems those unaltered by human activity are left on the planet,” Tyler said.
- The species present, their function in transferring energy, how those roles interact with one another, and how much the animals at the top of the food chain influence the remainder of the food web impact the community stability in ocean ecosystem structures. In order to determine whether the species and functions of these systems can endure these pressures, researchers are examining how these systems react to emergencies.
- In order to better understand how we might assist ocean ecosystems in recovering from harm, researchers can use the new UNLV research to detect the long-term effects of biological invasions, such as the introduction of new species and/or predators, as well as other environmental disturbances.
- We can better grasp the precise ways in which human activity has impacted ecosystems by taking a longer-term perspective, which can guide our restoration and conservation efforts.
The study was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
