Researchers use historic remnants like antlers, shells, teeth and pollen to learn how natural communities once worked. The clues serve as guides for restoration.
Conservationists seeking to restore shark populations on the Atlantic coast of Panama were facing a problem all too familiar to biologists: No records existed to document what pristine shark communities looked like before overfishing decimated the animals over the past few decades. Without that information, how could the restoration workers know what they should be aiming for?
Erin Dillon, a paleoecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, thought she had the solution. By sampling microfossils — dermal denticles, the “little teeth on the shark’s skin,” as she describes them — deposited on the ocean floor, Dillon was able to reconstruct a picture of shark communities in the region before human impact. Shark abundance on the Caribbean reefs has declined by over 70 percent, she found, with fast-swimming, open-water sharks hit the hardest.
Dillon is one of the rising stars in the burgeoning new field of conservation paleobiology, which uses the fossil record to inform and assist present-day conservation efforts. “We often need some sense of the way things used to be before there was extensive human impact,” says Karl Flessa, a paleobiologist at the University of Arizona who coined the term “conservation paleobiology” two decades ago and coauthored an early look at the field in the 2015 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Conservation paleobiologists are using the past to establish pre-disturbance baselines, as Dillon has done. They are also documenting long-term patterns of habitat use and revealing previously unsuspected changes in ecosystems as a result of human activity. By uncovering how species have responded as past climates changed, they are helping to understand how the same species may respond to climate change today. And their results are guiding management plans for some of the world’s most endangered ecosystems.
https://knowablemagazine.org/articl...7yFwuI-gfbogU-yKCJ0GxfqZ66CrxLW87rxF98SqOdWm0
Conservationists seeking to restore shark populations on the Atlantic coast of Panama were facing a problem all too familiar to biologists: No records existed to document what pristine shark communities looked like before overfishing decimated the animals over the past few decades. Without that information, how could the restoration workers know what they should be aiming for?
Erin Dillon, a paleoecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, thought she had the solution. By sampling microfossils — dermal denticles, the “little teeth on the shark’s skin,” as she describes them — deposited on the ocean floor, Dillon was able to reconstruct a picture of shark communities in the region before human impact. Shark abundance on the Caribbean reefs has declined by over 70 percent, she found, with fast-swimming, open-water sharks hit the hardest.
Dillon is one of the rising stars in the burgeoning new field of conservation paleobiology, which uses the fossil record to inform and assist present-day conservation efforts. “We often need some sense of the way things used to be before there was extensive human impact,” says Karl Flessa, a paleobiologist at the University of Arizona who coined the term “conservation paleobiology” two decades ago and coauthored an early look at the field in the 2015 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Conservation paleobiologists are using the past to establish pre-disturbance baselines, as Dillon has done. They are also documenting long-term patterns of habitat use and revealing previously unsuspected changes in ecosystems as a result of human activity. By uncovering how species have responded as past climates changed, they are helping to understand how the same species may respond to climate change today. And their results are guiding management plans for some of the world’s most endangered ecosystems.
https://knowablemagazine.org/articl...7yFwuI-gfbogU-yKCJ0GxfqZ66CrxLW87rxF98SqOdWm0