Understanding the ancient creature's impact could help aid conservation efforts.
How kelp farming is helping revive the economy and ecology of a Long Island bay.Overhunting likely drove the Steller’s sea cow to extinction and scientists believe that this change in the ecosystem was detrimental to the health of the west’s kelp forests., researchers from the California Academy of Sciences detail a new method that they used to figure out what historical kelp forests may have looked like when this marine megaherbivore was still grazing.
“Kelp forests are highly productive ecosystems. They act as storm buffers, are economically important for fishing, and are home to countless marine organisms, yet they are in steep decline throughout the Pacific,” Peter Roopnarine, study co-author and Academy Curator of Geology and Invertebrate Zoology, said. “When kelp forests were evolving millions of years ago, there were large marine herbivores like the Steller’s sea cow, which are now extinct.
. “In the short-term, wildfires have been seen as something to suppress because of the damage they bring to forest ecosystems. But recently we have learned that, in the long run, wildfires are a natural part of those systems that can lead to healthier, more resilient forests.”using a new way to evaluate the overall health of ecosystems.
“Today, we are surrounded by severely degraded ecosystems, places that were far healthier a mere century ago, let alone a millennium or more,”noted in the statement. “Growing numbers of these ecosystems are now in danger of collapse, even if we protect them. So if we are to help guide a given place toward a flourishing future, we must understand not only its current state of health, but past states as well, and then apply these insights toward calculated, regenerative interventions.
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Frontiers | Beyond functional diversity: The importance of trophic position to understanding functional processes in community evolutionEcosystem structure, that is the species present, the functions they represent, and how those functions interact, is an important determinant of community stability. This in turn affects how ecosystems respond to natural and anthropogenic crises, and whether species or the ecological functions that they represent are able to persist. Here we use fossil data from museum collections, literature, and the Paleobiology Database to reconstruct trophic networks of Tethyan paleocommunities from the Anisian and Carnian (Triassic), Bathonian (Jurassic), and Aptian (Cretaceous) Stages, and compare these to a previously reconstructed trophic network from a modern Jamaican reef community. We generated model food webs consistent with functional structure and taxon richnesses of communities, and compared distributions of guild level parameters among communities, to assess the effect of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution on ecosystem dynamics. We found that the trophic space of communities expanded from the Anisian to the Aptian, but this pattern was not monotonic. We also found that trophic position for a given guild was subject to variation depending on what other guilds were present in that stage. The Bathonian showed the lowest degree of trophic omnivory by top consumers among all Mesozoic networks, and was dominated by longer food chains. In contrast, the Aptian network displayed a greater degree of short food chains and trophic omnivory that we attribute to the novel presence of large predatory guilds, such as sharks and bony fish. Interestingly, the modern Jamaican community appeared to have a higher proportion of long chains, as was the case in the Bathonian. Overall, results indicate that trophic structure is highly dependent on the taxa and ecological functions present, primary production experienced by the community, and activity of top consumers. Results from this study point to a need to better understand trophic position when planning restoration activities because a comm
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