Dunhill, A.M. orcid.org/0000-0002-8680-9163, Zarzyczny, K., Shaw, J.O. et al. (3 more authors) (2024) Extinction cascades, community collapse, and recovery across a Mesozoic hyperthermal event. Nature Communications, 15. 8599. ISSN 2041-1723
Abstract
Mass extinctions are considered to be quintessential examples of Court Jester drivers of macroevolution, whereby abiotic pressures drive a suite of extinctions leading to huge ecosystem changes across geological timescales. Most research on mass extinctions ignores species interactions and community structure, limiting inference about which and why species go extinct, and how Red Queen processes that link speciation to extinction rates affect the subsequent recovery of biodiversity, structure and function. Here, we apply network reconstruction, secondary extinction modelling and community structure analysis to the Early Toarcian (Lower Jurassic; 183 Ma) Extinction Event and recovery. We find that primary extinctions targeted towards infaunal guilds, which caused secondary extinction cascades to higher trophic levels, reproduce the empirical post-extinction community most accurately. We find that the extinction event caused a switch from a diverse community with high levels of functional redundancy to a less diverse, more densely connected community of generalists. Recovery was characterised by a return to pre-extinction levels of some elements of community structure and function prior to the recovery of biodiversity. Full ecosystem recovery took ~7 million years at which point we see evidence of dramatically increased vertical structure linked to the Mesozoic Marine Revolution and modern marine ecosystem structure.
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Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Earth Surface Science Institute (ESSI) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/X015025/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/X012859/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 12 Sep 2024 13:11 |
Last Modified: | 10 Oct 2024 14:18 |
Published Version: | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53000-2 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41467-024-53000-2 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217113 |