The influence of environmental setting on the community ecology of Ediacaran organisms. ...

• Main Authors: Mitchell, Emily G, Bobkov, Nikolai, Bykova, Natalia, Dhungana, Alavya, Kolesnikov, Anton V, Hogarth, Ian RP, Liu, Alexander G, Mustill, Tom MR, Sozonov, Nikita, Rogov, Vladimir I, Xiao, Shuhai, Grazhdankin, Dmitriy V
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 2020
• Subjects: Ediacaran; early animal diversification; palaeoecology; spatial analysis; Arctic; White Sea; Siberia
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.51419; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/304337

The broad-scale environment plays a substantial role in shaping modern marine ecosystems, but the degree to which palaeocommunities were influenced by their environment is unclear. To investigate how broad-scale environment influenced the community ecology of early animal ecosystems, we employed spatial point process analyses (SPPA) to examine the community structure of seven late Ediacaran (558-550 Ma) bedding-plane assemblages drawn from a range of environmental settings and global localities. The studied palaeocommunities exhibit marked differences in the response of their component taxa to sub-metre-scale habitat heterogeneities on the seafloor. Shallow-marine (nearshore) palaeocommunities were heavily influenced by local habitat heterogeneities, in contrast to their deeper-water counterparts. The local patchiness within shallow-water communities may have been further accentuated by the presence of grazers and detritivores, whose behaviours potentially initiated a propagation of increasing habitat ... : This work has been supported by the Natural Environment Research Council [grant numbers NE/P002412/1 and Independent Research Fellowship NE/S014756/1 to EGM, and Independent Research Fellowship NE/L011409/2 to AGL], a Gibbs Travelling Fellowship (2016-2017) from Newnham College, Cambridge, and a Henslow Research Fellowship from Cambridge Philosophical Society to EGM (2016–-2019). Field research in the White Sea Region, Arctic Siberia and Central Urals has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation [grant number 17-17-01241 to DG]. SX acknowledges funding from the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program [80NSSC18K1086]. Large image processing and interpretation of photomontages of the Dickinsonia Surface was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research [grant number 19-05-00828 to AVK]. ...