Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 104, Issue 38, Pages 15006-15010Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704960104
Keywords
macroecology; macroevolution
Categories
Funding
- Division Of Ocean Sciences
- Directorate For Geosciences [0962708] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The importance of ecological interactions in driving the evolution of animals has been the focus of intense debate among paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and macroecologists. To test whether the intensity of such interactions covaries with the secular evolutionary trend in global biodiversity, we compiled a species-level database of predation intensity, as measured by the frequency of common predation traces (drillings and repair scars ranging in age from Ediacaran to Holocene). The results indicate that the frequency of predation traces increased notably by the Ordovician, and not in the mid-Paleozoic as suggested by multiple previous studies. Importantly, these estimates of predation intensity and global diversity of marine metazoans correlate throughout the Phanerozoic fossil record regardless of corrections and methods applied. This concordance may represent (i) an ecological signal: long-term coupling of diversity and predation; (ii) a diversity-driven diffusion of predatory behaviors: an increased probability of more complex predatory strategies to appear at higher diversity levels; or (iii) a spurious concordance in signal capture: an artifact where rare species and less-frequent (e.g., trace-producing) predatory behaviors are both more detectable at times when sampling improves. The coupling of predation and diversity records suggests that macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns share common causative mechanisms that may reflect either historical processes or sampling artifacts.
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