Late Cenozoic cooling restructured global marine plankton communities

Adam Woodhouse; Anshuman Swain; William F Fagan; Andrew J Fraass; Christopher M Lowery

doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05694-5

Late Cenozoic cooling restructured global marine plankton communities

Nature. 2023 Feb;614(7949):713-718. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05694-5. Epub 2023 Feb 15.

Authors

Adam Woodhouse^#¹, Anshuman Swain^#^{2

3

4

5}, William F Fagan², Andrew J Fraass^{6

7

8}, Christopher M Lowery⁹

Affiliations

¹ University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA. adam.woodhouse@austin.utexas.edu.
² Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
³ Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁴ Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁵ Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, USA.
⁶ School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
⁷ Invertebrate Paleontology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
⁸ School of Earth Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
⁹ University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 36792824
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05694-5

Abstract

The geographic ranges of marine organisms, including planktonic foraminifera¹, diatoms, dinoflagellates², copepods³ and fish⁴, are shifting polewards owing to anthropogenic climate change⁵. However, the extent to which species will move and whether these poleward range shifts represent precursor signals that lead to extinction is unclear⁶. Understanding the development of marine biodiversity patterns over geological time and the factors that influence them are key to contextualizing these current trends. The fossil record of the macroperforate planktonic foraminifera provides a rich and phylogenetically resolved dataset that provides unique opportunities for understanding marine biogeography dynamics and how species distributions have responded to ancient climate changes. Here we apply a bipartite network approach to quantify group diversity, latitudinal specialization and latitudinal equitability for planktonic foraminifera over the past eight million years using Triton, a recently developed high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminiferal occurrences⁷. The results depict a global, clade-wide shift towards the Equator in ecological and morphological community equitability over the past eight million years in response to temperature changes during the late Cenozoic bipolar ice sheet formation. Collectively, the Triton data indicate the presence of a latitudinal equitability gradient among planktonic foraminiferal functional groups which is coupled to the latitudinal biodiversity gradient only through the geologically recent past (the past two million years). Before this time, latitudinal equitability gradients indicate that higher latitudes promoted community equitability across ecological and morphological groups. Observed range shifts among marine planktonic microorganisms^1,2,8 in the recent and geological past suggest substantial poleward expansion of marine communities even under the most conservative future global warming scenarios.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animals
Aquatic Organisms* / classification
Aquatic Organisms* / isolation & purification
Biodiversity*
Cold Temperature*
Datasets as Topic
Foraminifera* / classification
Foraminifera* / isolation & purification
Fossils
Geographic Mapping*
History, Ancient
Hydrobiology
Phylogeny
Phylogeography*
Plankton* / classification
Plankton* / isolation & purification
Spatio-Temporal Analysis*
Time Factors