Do predatory drill holes influence the transport and deposition of gastropod shells?

Molinaro, Darrin J.; Collins, Ben M. J.; Burns, Michael E.; Stafford, Emily S.; Leighton, Lindsey R.

doi:10.1111/let.12030

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Additionally, drilling frequency can be affected by hydrodynamic differences between drilled and undrilled shells. A number of experimental studies have demonstrated that drilled shells entrain at lower velocities than undrilled shells of the same species (Chattopadhyay et al, 2013b;Lever et al, 1961; but see Molinaro et al, 2013). Chattopadhyay et al (2013b) also demonstrated that the position of the drill hole dictates the entrainment velocity, implying possible sorting based on stereotypic drill-hole site selection by the driller.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predation in the marine fossil record: Studies, data, recognition, environmental factors, and behavior

Klompmaker

Kelley

Chattopadhyay

et al. 2019

Earth-Science Reviews

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The fossil record is the primary source of data used to study predator-prey interactions in deep time and to evaluate key questions regarding the evolutionary and ecological importance of predation. Here, we review the types of paleontological data used to infer predation in the marine fossil record, discuss strengths and limitations of paleontological lines of evidence used to recognize and evaluate predatory activity, assess the influence of environmental gradients on predation patterns, and review fossil evidence for predator behavior and prey defense. We assembled a predation database from the literature that documents a steady increase in the number of papers on predation since the 1960s. These studies have become increasingly quantitative and have expanded in focus from reporting cases of predation documented by fossils to using the fossil record of predation to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. The data on the fossil record of predation amassed so far in the literature primarily come from trace fossils, mostly drill holes and, to a lesser extent, repair scars, derived predominantly from the Cenozoic of Europe and North America. Mollusks are the clade most often studied as prey and inferred predators. We discuss how to distinguish biotic from abiotic damage and predatory from parasitic traces, and how to recognize failed predation. Our data show that identifying the predator is easiest when predator and prey are preserved in the act of predation or when predators were fossilized with their gut contents preserved. However, determining the culprits responsible for bite traces, drill holes, and other types of predation traces can be more problematic.Taphonomic and other factors can distort patterns of predation, but their potential effects can be minimized by careful study design. With the correct identification and quantification of fossilized traces of predation, ecological trends in predator-prey interactions may be discerned along environmental gradients in water depth, habitat, and oxygen and nutrient availability.However, so far, these trends have not been explored adequately for the fossil record. We also

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Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predation in the marine fossil record: Studies, data, recognition, environmental factors, and behavior

Klompmaker

Kelley

Chattopadhyay

et al. 2019

Earth-Science Reviews

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“…Fossil assemblages, even when collected in bulk or otherwise (Ottens et al 2012) to avoid collection bias, still show various types of preservation biases (Kidwell 2002). These include (nonexhaustively): preferential preservation of larger, more robust individuals; hydrodynamic sorting through transport (Molinaro et al 2013; Chattopadhyay et al 2013a,b) and nonuniform sampling of living populations (e.g., fossilization of organisms where young and adults live in different environments), with the general tendency being to remove smaller specimens from the record, as shown by Cooper et al (2006). Museum collections, suffering from both biostratinomic and collection bias, are likely to be particularly unrepresentative.…”

Section: Practical Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling durophagous predation and mortality rates from the fossil record of gastropods

Budd¹,

Mann

2019

Paleobiology

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Gastropods often show signs of unsuccessful attacks by durophagous predators in the form of healed scars in their shells. As such, fossil gastropods can be taken as providing a record of predation through geological time. However, interpreting the number of such scars has proved to be problematic—Would a low number of scars mean a low rate of attack or a high rate of success, for example? Here we develop a model of population dynamics among individuals exposed to predation, including both lethal and nonlethal attacks. Using this model, we calculate the equilibrium distributions of ages and healed scars in the population and among fossilized specimens, based on the assumption that predation is independent of age or scar number. Based on these results, we formally show that the rates of attack and success cannot be disambiguated without further information about population structure. Nevertheless, by making the assumptions that the non-durophagous predatory death rate is both constant and low, we show that it is possible to use relatively small assemblages of gastropods to produce accurate estimates of both attack and success rates, if the overall death rate can be estimated. We consider likely violations of the assumptions in our model and what sort of information would be required to solve this problem in these more general cases. However, it is not easy to extract the relevant information from the fossil record: a variety of important biases are likely to intervene to obscure the data that gastropod assemblages may yield. Nonetheless, the model provides a theoretical framework for interpreting summary data, including for comparison between different assemblages.

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“…Drilled gastropod shells do not have the same proclivity for fluid transport because the drill hole is often rotated to the underside of shells resting on the seafloor (Molinaro et al, 2013). A potential bias that has been considered less often is fragmentation of undrilled shells by shellcrushing predators, which would have the opposite effect on drilling frequency, by removing undrilled shells (Ansell and Morton, 1985;Harper et al, 1998;Kelley and Hansen, 2003).…”

Section: Biases Of Drilling Intensitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Common mollusk genera indicate interactions with their predators were ecologically stable across the Plio-Pleistocene extinction

Sime

Kelley

2016

Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology

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We use the trace-fossil record left by the shell-drilling and crushing predators of marine mollusks to investigate the paleoecology of mass extinction. The pulsed extinction of mollusks during the Plio-Pleistocene, in the Western Atlantic, was part of a dramatic faunal turnover coinciding with a decrease in relative abundance of predatory gastropods and an overall relaxation of competition in the predatory milieu. We test the hypothesis that these changes affected the coupled strength and outcome of predator-prey interactions-including those involving the myriad shell-crushing predators in marine food webs, utilizing repaired shell damage and drill holes on five common, or bellwether, prey: Anadara, Cyclocardia, Glycymeris, Plicatula, and Olivella. Predation and abundance data were collected from bulk samples (>5mm fraction), comprising one late Pliocene (Duplin Formation), one early Pleistocene and two middle Pleistocene (Waccamaw Formation) age localities from southeastern North Carolina, USA. The results do not support our hypothesis because there was no unambiguous change in the frequency of repair scars on any of the bellwether prey taxa. The significant difference in Glycymeris repairs per shell (p < 0.001) is equivocal due to any one of the morphological, ecological, or methodological complications of species comparisons. There is also no change in the frequency of complete, countersunk drill holes between the Plio-Pleistocene time intervals. A range of biases can subtly affect estimates of fossil predation; left-right valve sorting and destruction of shells by predators may have been active biases here. The presence or absence of edge-drill holes in assemblages across the Western Atlantic suggests predator-prey interactions varied locally. The reported decline of predatory gastropod abundance was not recovered in a subset of previously studied samples. These results support the interpretation that changes in taxonomic composition and predatory interactions were decoupled in ancient communities.

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Do predatory drill holes influence the transport and deposition of gastropod shells?

Cited by 12 publications

References 25 publications

Predation in the marine fossil record: Studies, data, recognition, environmental factors, and behavior

Predation in the marine fossil record: Studies, data, recognition, environmental factors, and behavior

Modeling durophagous predation and mortality rates from the fossil record of gastropods

Common mollusk genera indicate interactions with their predators were ecologically stable across the Plio-Pleistocene extinction

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