Convergence, divergence, and parallelism in marine biodiversity trends: Integrating present-day and fossil data

Significance The fossil record can reveal the complex history behind present-day diversity patterns. For marine bivalves, similarities and differences in species diversity within lineages among regions are better explained by past extinction, origination, and immigration than by contrasts in today’s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2015-04, Vol.112 (16), p.4903-4908
Main Authors: Huang, Shan, Roy, Kaustuv, Valentine, James W., Jablonski, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Aquatic Organisms - classification
Biodiversity
Biological Sciences
Bivalvia
Bivalvia - classification
Coasts
Extinction
Extinction, Biological
Fossils
Geological time
Mollusks
North America
Oceans and Seas
Paleontology
Phylogeny
Physical Sciences
SPECIAL FEATURE: PERSPECTIVE
Temperature
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Summary:Significance The fossil record can reveal the complex history behind present-day diversity patterns. For marine bivalves, similarities and differences in species diversity within lineages among regions are better explained by past extinction, origination, and immigration than by contrasts in today’s climates alone. A signature of more severe extinction in the western Atlantic relative to the western Pacific coast is still evident in the tropics, but not in the temperate zone, where more prolific diversification and/or immigration has allowed the western Atlantic to match or surpass eastern Pacific diversities for many lineages. Species persistence in the temperate zone is associated with broad geographic range prior to an extinction pulse ∼2−3 My ago, underscoring the importance of history for understanding modern biodiversity patterns. Paleontological data provide essential insights into the processes shaping the spatial distribution of present-day biodiversity. Here, we combine biogeographic data with the fossil record to investigate the roles of parallelism (similar diversities reached via changes from similar starting points), convergence (similar diversities reached from different starting points), and divergence in shaping the present-day latitudinal diversity gradients of marine bivalves along the two North American coasts. Although both faunas show the expected overall poleward decline in species richness, the trends differ between the coasts, and the discrepancies are not explained simply by present-day temperature differences. Instead, the fossil record indicates that both coasts have declined in overall diversity over the past 3 My, but the western Atlantic fauna suffered more severe Pliocene−Pleistocene extinction than did the eastern Pacific. Tropical western Atlantic diversity remains lower than the eastern Pacific, but warm temperate western Atlantic diversity recovered to exceed that of the temperate eastern Pacific, either through immigration or in situ origination. At the clade level, bivalve families shared by the two coasts followed a variety of paths toward today’s diversities. The drivers of these lineage-level differences remain unclear, but species with broad geographic ranges during the Pliocene were more likely than geographically restricted species to persist in the temperate zone, suggesting that past differences in geographic range sizes among clades may underlie between-coast contrasts. More detailed comparative work on region
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1412219112