Drilling predation on Antarctic tusk shells: first records on Recent scaphopods from the Southern Hemisphere

Abstract

Drillholes on shells are one of the few predation marks preserved in fossil molluscs, providing an opportunity to study and quantify predator-prey interactions in the palaeontological record. Among these, reports of drilling predation on scaphopods are rare, and such information from Antarctica is non-existent. We describe the finding of drillholes on scaphopods recovered from Recent mollusc assemblages between depths of 246.5 and 454.0 m in West Antarctica. The predation traces located in the middle sectors of two preyed shells belonging to Siphonodentalium dalli and Dentalium majorinum are identified as Oichnus and are interpreted as produced by naticids, probably Pseudamauropsis aureolutea. These new records constitute the first reports of drilling predation on scaphopods in Antarctica and also for Recent scaphopods of the Southern Hemisphere.

Community evenness and sample size affect estimates of predation intensity and prey selection: A model-based validation

“…Paleontological research on predation has expanded rapidly in scope, methods, and goals. In the recent years, many studies focused on documenting the evidence of predation from times, geographic areas, and taxa that are poorly known for their predation record (Rojas et al 2014; Randle and Sansom 2019; Bicknell and Holland 2020; Gordillo and Malvé 2021; Klompmaker and Landman 2021; Gordillo et al 2022) and using predation records for testing evolutionary hypotheses (Klompmaker et al 2017; Gehling and Droser 2018; Harper et al 2018; Lerosey-Aubril and Peel 2018; Petsios et al 2021). In contrast, a relatively small number of studies focused on the analytical methods to evaluate the reliability of predation measures in recent years (Smith et al 2018, 2019, 2022; Budd and Mann 2019).…”