RESILIENCE AND STABILITY OF PERMO-TRIASSIC KAROO BASIN COMMUNITIES

Tags

biodiversity, extinction, food webs, modeling, paleo-food web, paleontology, simulations, trophic guild

Late Permian community dynamics

This is the second presentation that I made at the Annual Conference of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver last month. The presentation was part of a special session, “Extreme Environmental Conditions and Biotic Responses during the Permian-Triassic Boundary Crisis and Early Triassic Recovery”, co-organized my myself, Tom Algeo, Hugo Bucher and Arne Winguth. The session, spanning two days, was excellent, outstanding, and a lot of fun! I came away with the firm conviction that we are beginning to really understand the massive Permo-Triassic mass extinction, from its causes to consequences to recovery. It truly was a watershed “moment” in the history of the biosphere. The full program for both days can be found here and here. And, here is the abstract. An online copy of the presentation is available here.

RESILIENCE AND STABILITY OF PERMO-TRIASSIC KAROO BASIN COMMUNITIES: THE IMPORTANCE OF SPECIES RICHNESS AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY TO ECOLOGICAL STABILITY AND ECOSYSTEM RECOVERY

ROOPNARINE, Peter, Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Dr, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 94118, proopnarine@calacademy.org and ANGIELCZYK, Kenneth D., Department of Geology, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605

A central question of the P/Tr extinction is the manner in which Permian ecological communities collapsed and E. Triassic ones were built. The end Permian Dicynodon Assemblage Zone (DAZ) has recently been resolved into 3 phases of the extinction spanning ~120ky, followed by the E. Triassic (Induan) Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone (LAZ), offering an opportunity to examine the ecological dynamics of extinction and recovery in enhanced detail. We do this with 2 modelling approaches.

The first model assumes that populations exist in an energetic balance between consumption and predation. Communities are modelled as stochastic variants sampled from a space defined by species richness and functional diversity. Paleoenvironmental data from the DAZ indicate an increasingly seasonal, arid and drought-prone environment. The models were perturbed by simulated reductions of primary productivity. Results show that DAZ Phase 0 (Ph0) was a robust community resistant to low-moderate levels of perturbation with a well-defined collapse threshold. DAZ Ph1 and Ph2, however, exhibit highly variable responses and are significantly less resistant. LAZ similarly exhibits highly variable responses across minor variation of model configurations.

The second model assumes that communities are locally stable, i.e. minor perturbations are followed by asymptotic returns to equilibrium. During this return, however, communities can exhibit transient behavior during which perturbations can be greatly amplified. Amplification is likely to be important in unstable environments when the frequency of perturbations is shorter than the return time to equilibrium. Applying this model to DAZ and LAZ communities shows that the Karoo ecosystem became more limited in its responses to perturbation as the P/Tr boundary was approached, with Ph1 and Ph2 communities exhibiting very little transient behavior. LAZ in contrast exhibits increased transience.

The energetics and stability models are reconcilable in a history where the Karoo ecosystem became more ecologically stable as the extinction unfolded, yet more sensitive to cascading effects of species extinction and reductions of productivity. The Induan ecosystem was an unrecovered one, sensitive to both extinction and minor ecological disturbances.

Modern and paleocommunity analogues

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connectance, coral reef, food webs, marine communities, modeling, Network theory, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, real world networks, Scientific models, trophic guild, trophic level

Last week I gave a keynote presentation at the annual conference of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver. Here is the abstract, and a link to the presentation (pdf file).

ANCIENT AND MODERN COMMUNITIES AS RECIPROCAL ANALOGUES OF PERSISTENCE AND STABILITY

ROOPNARINE, Peter, Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Dr, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 94118, proopnarine@calacademy.org
Paleocommunities are spatio-temporally averaged communities structured by biotic interactions and abiotic factors. The best data on paleocommunity structures are estimates of species richness, number of biotic interactions and the topology of interactions. These provide insights into paleoecological dynamics if modern communities are used as analogs; e.g., the recent lionfish invasion of the western Atlantic is the first modern invasion of a marine ecosystem by a high trophic-level predator and serves as an analog for the invasion of paleocommunities by new predators during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. Despite the invader’s broad diet, it targets very specific parts of the invaded food web. This will lead to non-uniform escalation on evolutionary timescales.

Theoretical ecology provides a rich framework for exploring dynamics of community persistence. Persistence–the stability of species richness and composition on geological timescales–is central to paleoecology. Ecological stability, a community’s return to stability after perturbation, is not necessary for geological persistence. However, it does dictate a community’s response to perturbation, and thus a species’ persistence or extinction. What then is the relationship between paleoecological richness/composition and ecological stability? How do communities respond to losses of species richness or ecological function? Questions of stability and diversity loss are addressed with an examination of transient responses and species deletion stability analyses of end-Permian terrestrial paleocommunities of the Karoo Basin. Transience is measured as the degree to which a perturbation is amplified over ecological time, even as a community returns asymptotically to stability. Transience during times of frequent perturbation, as during times of environmental crises, decreases the likelihood of a persistently stable community. Species deletion stability measures the dynamic response of a community to the loss of single species. It is an open question whether communities become more vulnerable or more resistant during environmental crises. That process, which has occurred repeatedly in the geological past, is important to the fate of threatened modern communities.

Science Today: Studying paleo-food webs

Tags

california academy of sciences, extinction, food webs, paleo-food web, paleontology

One of the most important ways species interact in an ecosystem? Food Webs. Learn how researchers study paleo and present-day food webs.
From the California Academy of Sciences.

PNAS: Late Cretaceous restructuring of terrestrial communities facilitated the End-Cretaceous mass extinction in North America

Tags

Cretaceous, dinosaurs, extinction, food webs, mass extinction, modeling, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, Robustness, Scientific models, simulations, Tipping point, trophic guild

That’s the title of our new paper, hot off the PNAS press. This study was a lot of fun, because it combines my food web work with one of the best known events in the fossil record. The lead author is Jonathan Mitchell, a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Jon became familiar with the food web work via Ken Angielczyk at the Field Museum, also in Chicago, a former post-doctoral researcher in my lab and close collaborator.  Jon wondered what Late Cretaceous, dinosaur-bearing communities would look like when subjected to CEG perturbations (just search this blog for info. on CEG!), and presented his results two years ago at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America. The results were so intriguing that we decided then to explore the question in much greater detail, and ask what sorts of community and ecosystem changes unfolded in the years before the Chicxulub impact, and what role they might have played in the subsequent extinctions. And here are the results! I will list the full reference below, and you can obtain a complete copy of the paper from PNAS (sorry, not open access). Also, here are links to some news websites that have covered the paper, as well as the paper’s abstract. Enjoy!

EurekAlert, Science Daily, Science Codex

Jonathan S. Mitchell, Peter D. Roopnarine, and Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Late Cretaceous restructuring of terrestrial communities facilitated the End-Cretaceous mass extinction in North America. PNAS, October 29, 2012

ABSTRACT

The sudden environmental catastrophe in the wake of the end-
Cretaceous asteroid impact had drastic effects that rippled through
animal communities. To explore how these effects may have been
exacerbated by prior ecological changes, we used a food-web
model to simulate the effects of primary productivity disruptions,
such as those predicted to result from an asteroid impact, on ten
Campanian and seven Maastrichtian terrestrial localities in North
America. Our analysis documents that a shift in trophic structure
between Campanian and Maastrichtian communities in North
America led Maastrichtian communities to experience more second-
ary extinction at lower levels of primary production shutdown and
possess a lower collapse threshold than Campanian communities.
Of particular note is the fact that changes in dinosaur richness had
a negative impact on the robustness of Maastrichtian ecosystems
against environmental perturbations. Therefore, earlier ecological
restructuring may have exacerbated the impact and severity of the
end-Cretaceous extinction, at least in North America.

Instability in the Early Triassic!

Tags

competition, extinction, modeling, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, Permian-Triassic, Scientific models

In a recent paper in the Royal Society Proceedings B, Randy Irmis and Jessica Whiteside verify a prediction of the CEG model regarding earliest Triassic terrestrial communities of the Karoo Basin in South Africa. Ken Angielczyk and I were interviewed by Wired Science for an article about the paper. Read it all here!

We predicted that communities in the Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone would exhibit intrinsic instability in the face of even mild disruptions of primary productivity. More recently (and here), we explained that the intrinsic instability stemmed from the rapid diversification of small to medium-sized synapsid carnivores in the aftermath of the end-Permian mass extinction, coupled with very low species richness of herbivorous tetrapod prey, and the resulting intensity of competitive interactions among the carnivores. The recent Proceedings B paper seems to support our prediction on the basis of relative abundances of species of different trophic ecologies, characterizing those species as “boom and bust”. It’s always great to have model verification!

I think that there are some unresolved questions though:

1. We also suggested that one way out of the conundrum would be the increased specialization of the carnivores. Contrary to Irmis and Whiteside, I don’t agree that uneven relative abundances necessarily lead to demographic boom and bust cycles. Community dynamics are more nuanced and flexible than that.
2. The authors also point to probable environmental instability based on carbon cycles (measured as carbon stable isotope signatures). They valiantly overlap the short Karoo signature with the much longer and highly resolved marine signature. We simply have no good correlation of these signatures, and this is at least a nice attempt to highlight this ongoing issue.

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. (Einstein)

A species’s tragedy of the commons

Tags

biodiversity, carrying capacity, cascades, competition, extinction, food webs, interaction strength, link distribution, link strength, modeling, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, Robustness, Scientific models, simulations, Tipping point, trophic guild

My colleague Ken Angielczyk and I have a new paper out in the Royal Society‘s Biology Letters, entitled “The evolutionary palaeoecology of species and the tragedy of the commons“. If you have never read Garrett Hardin’s original paper on the tragedy of the commons, I strongly suggest that you do. It is a principle that I believe has broad application, and would well be worth a re-visit (first visit?!) by today’s leaders and economists. Our paper can be found here or here (first page only). And here is the abstract, as a little teaser!

Abstract

The fossil record presents palaeoecological pat-
terns of rise and fall on multiple scales of time
and biological organization. Here, we argue that
the rise and fall of species can result from a tragedy
of the commons, wherein the pursuit of self-inter-
ests by individual agents in a larger interactive
system is detrimental to the overall performance
or condition of the system. Species evolving
within particular communities may conform to
this situation, affecting the ecological robustness
of their communities. Results from a trophic
network model of Permian–Triassic terrestrial
communities suggest that community perform-
ance on geological timescales may in turn
constrain the evolutionary opportunities and
histories of the species within them.

New paper – Networks, extinction and paleocommunity food webs

Tags

connectance, extinction, food webs, graph, link distribution, metanetwork, Network theory, networks, nonlinear, paleo-food web, power law, probability, real world networks, Robustness, simulations, trophic guild

Roopnarine, P. D. 2010. Networks, extinction and paleocommunity food webs in J. Alroy and G. Hunt, eds., Quantitative Methods in Paleobiology, The Paleontological Society Papers, 16: 143-161. (available here).

The paper is part of a volume, Quantitative Methods in Paleobiology, sponsored by The Paleontological Society. Full details are available here. The volume is also available for sale. Purchase one and support the Society!

Critical threshold

Tags

giant component, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, simulations, Threshold, Tipping point

LAZ with CAZ richnesses for g10 and g11

What causes the critical threshold increase of secondary extinction in a typical CEG simulation? It cannot be a simple result of increasing the perturbation magnitude, ; that is given by topololgical secondary extinction. CEG differs from the simple topological model in several ways. First, link strengths are not uniform but are instead a function of in-degree. Second, nodes are not equivalent, but have dynamic population sizes. And third, there are topdown effects. Somehow, top down feedback initiates catastrophic collapse at a very specific perturbation magnitude. Bel ow that threshold, responses are dampened. Why? I hypothesize that at the threshold, a giant component in the network is activated. Given that the component is present no matter the magnitude of perturbation, activation must depend on link strengths, which in CEG are dynamic.

Unbalanced food webs

Tags

extinction, food webs, modeling, Network theory, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, real world networks, simulations

Perturbation simulations of three Karoo communities. 100 sims. per community.

A number of earlier posts have discussed food webs of the Permian-Triassic of the Karoo Basin in South Africa. This terrestrial ecosystem was subjected to the devastating end Permian mass extinction. The community which emerged in the aftermath of the extinction, the Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone (LAZ), has been identified as having very unusual food web dynamics. This first figure compares the CEG dynamics of the end Permian Dicynodon Assemblage Zone (DAZ), LAZ, and the successive Cynognathus Assemblage Zone (CAZ). The implication is that there was a breakdown of perturbation dynamics during and/or right after the extinction episode. LAZ differs from the other communities (and in fact from every other community that we’ve studied so far!) in two ways:

1. Levels of secondary extinction can be extremely high at low peturbation levels, implying food webs of very low resistance.
2. Many species level networks or food webs (SLNs) of LAZ are nevertheless quite resistant, and resemble SLNs from the other communities. So the SLNs, or at least their dynamics, are highly variable in LAZ.

So what causes all this?

Distribution of log(low pert. sd) for random networks. Karoo communities are marked in green. LAZ occupies the extreme right.

The first question we asked ourselves was, is LAZ an unusually bad community or metanetwork, or are the other Karoo communities just exceptionally good? Our approach to addressing this was to generate 1,000 random metanetworks by randomly selecting observed guild richnesses from among our observed communities to fill the richness of a random community. A random community or metanetwork could therefore have guild richnesses that never occur together in any of the observed communities, but every guild richness of a random community is observed in at least one real Karoo community. We then simulated perturbation of 100 SLNs for each random community, and collected data on the first observation above, i.e., the variability of resistance at low levels of perturbation. As we see in the second figure, LAZ really stands out, even among the random communities! Why?

Well, in order to address that, we’ve used a number of regression models to examine the dependence of that variability on proportional guild richness. Proportional guild richness, in contrast to absolute, is the fraction of a community’s total consumer richness encompassed by a particular guild. Several guilds consistently stand out: very large amphibians, very small herbivorous amniotes, very small carnivorous/insectivorous amniotes, small carnivorous/insectivorous amniotes, carnivorous insects, and herbivorous insects. Multiple regression models demonstrate that the herbivorous guilds affect resistance variability negatively, i.e., they dampen the variability, while carnivorous guilds affect it positively! Now here’s the neat part. If we examine the sub-metanetworks of DAZ, LAZ and CAZ comprising these guilds only (see figure), we can immediately see how the communities differed with respect to these crucial guilds. Guilds with a dampening effect are shown in blue, those in red have the opposite effect (producer guilds are brown). And if you think of LAZ as being somehow imbalanced or out of whack, the figures should suggest to you some ways to “restore the balance”. I’ll discuss those in the next post.

The Probability of Extinction

Tags

connectance, extinction, link distribution, metanetwork, paleo-food web, probability, Robustness

p(extinction) when number of prey species=10

The CEG model asserts that food web structure plays a role in extinction. The intricate patterns of relationships among species in a community distribute the effects of changes in one species to others in its community. Therefore, while the ultimate causes of increased extinction in an interval of time may be abiotic, and might affect only some species directly, the effects could be felt more broadly.

Topographic secondary extinction.–The narrow definition of secondary extinction, where a species becomes extinct because it has lost all its resources, is termed topological secondary extinction (Roopnarine, 2009). Topological refers to the dependence of extinction solely upon the topology (pattern) of the network. Note that topological secondary extinction affects the network only in a bottom-up fashion, that is, in the direction of energy flow from producers to consumers of increasing trophic level. Measuring or estimating topological secondary extinction in a food web, in response to a particular perturbation, can be approached in three ways, again depending on whether one assumes accuracy of a higher-level representation of the food web (e.g. a metanetwork) or precision of a species-level network. Here I will outline a probabilistic approach using metanetworks.

Let a perturbation of magnitude be equal to the number of species removed randomly from the network. The probability that a species will become secondarily extinct is the probability that all its links are to species that are a subset of the set. This is determined from a hypergeometric distribution, where we can first ask: Given an in-degree of , what is the probability that of them will be lost?

where there are S-1 other species in the network and . The probability of becoming extinct occurs when ,

The formula can be re-stated interestingly as

where trophic breadth is the number of species consumed by species , out of a pool of potential prey (species richness). For example, in a network of 10 species, and , and the probability of extinction increases as , and decreases as (see figure). Species with more resources are thus more resistant to topological secondary extinction. This is the same as saying that the more trophically generalized a species, the greater its resistance to extinction.

This explains in part the suggestion that food webs of greater connectance (C) are more resistant to topological secondary extinction (Dunne et al., 2002). Overall food web or network resistance to this type of extinction has been termed structural robustness (Dunne and Williams, 2009). Food web connectance does not increase, however, because of uniform increases in the in-degrees of all species in the network, but increases instead because of the presence of highly linked species. The skewed, long-tailed in-link distributions discussed earlier indicate the non-uniformity of in-degrees within real food webs. The above formula for extinction shows that , that is, is of greater in-degree than . This will also be the case if the species on which preys are more resistant to extinction, even if . The presence of generalist consumers therefore enhances robustness both because of their own greater resistance, and the resistance which they confer upon their consumers.