Natural Science Forum / Biology / Evolution / June 2008

Published online 4 June 2008 | Nature 453, 717-718 (2008) |
doi:10.1038/453717a

Palaeobiology: The Cambrian smorgasbord
Animal behaviour is an endless challenge to mathematical modellers. In the
first of two features, Mark Buchanan looks at how a mathematical principle
from physics might be able to explain patterns of movement. In this, the
second, Arran Frood asks what current models can teach us about ecological
networks half a billion years old.

Arran Frood

It began, appropriately enough for research into food webs, over lunch. And
appropriately for ambitious and interdisciplinary research, that lunch in
2001 was at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, an organization famous for
bringing together creative assemblages of scientists from different fields.
Jennifer Dunne, an ecologist at the institute, had been giving a talk about
untangling food webs - the networks of who eats who within an ecosystem - by
using sophisticated new models. In the audience, and now at her lunch table,
was Douglas Erwin, a palaeobiologist based at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington DC. Erwin is, among other things, the curator of the
institution's Burgess Shale collection, which despite being more than 500
million years old is one of the best-preserved fossil assemblages in the
world.

"We immediately began to brainstorm about whether network analyses could be
done with ancient communities," says Dunne. In the past, researchers have
assumed that fossil data were not good enough to construct food webs that
would be accurate and useful down to the species level; but Dunne's
approach, the two thought, might change that. "We weren't sure how the
palaeontology community would perceive it," Erwin says. "But we were all
pretty excited by the idea." They hoped that it would not merely provide a
new look at an ancient community, but that ancient ecologies might cast new
light on modern ones, too. Ecologists have shown that modern food webs
follow certain rules, such as the distribution of links increasing
proportionally with the number of species, or with diversity. But are there
universal laws, or are these rules merely a reflection of the world as it
happens to be at the moment?

Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080604/full/453717a.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek