ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Eighty-five million years of Pacific Ocean gyre ecosystem structure: long-term stability marked by punctuated change.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Coupled increases in pelagic fish productivity and export productivity during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Habitat-specific temporal variation in the pace of fish diversification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Ecological restructuring of North Tethyan marine vertebrate communities triggered by the end-Cretaceous extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Quantifying the Denticle Multiverse: A Standardized Coding System to Capture Three Dimensional Morphological Variations for Quantitative Evolutionary and Ecological Studies of Elasmobranch Denticles.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- The Micropaleoecology Framework: Evaluating Biotic Responses to Global Change Through Paleoproxy, Microfossil, and Ecological Data Integration.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- Late Cretaceous ammonoids show that drivers of diversification are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Datasets for training and validating a deep learning-based system to detect microfossil fish teeth from slide images.Data in brief · 2023Article
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- Evolutionary time and species diversity in aquatic ecosystems worldwide.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Review
- Tooth morphology elucidates shark evolution across the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Enhanced fish production during a period of extreme global warmth.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Fish proliferation and rare-earth deposition by topographically induced upwelling at the late Eocene cooling event.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- A phylogenomic framework for pelagiarian fishes (Acanthomorpha: Percomorpha) highlights mosaic radiation in the open ocean.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Two pulses of morphological diversification in Pacific pelagic fishes following the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Links between fish abundance and ocean biogeochemistry as recorded in marine sediments.PloS one · 2018Article
- Earth system feedback statistically extracted from the Indian Ocean deep-sea sediments recording Eocene hyperthermals.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Independent evolution of baleen whale gigantism linked to Plio-Pleistocene ocean dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While the history of taxonomic diversification in open ocean lineages of ray-finned fish and elasmobranchs is increasingly known, the evolution of their roles within the open ocean ecosystem remains poorly understood. To assess the relative importance of these groups through time, we measured the accumulation rate of microfossil fish teeth and elasmobranch dermal denticles (ichthyoliths) in deep-sea sediment cores from the North and South Pacific gyres over the past 85 million years (Myr). We find three distinct and stable open ocean ecosystem structures, each defined by the relative and absolute abundance of elasmobranch and ray-finned fish remains. The Cretaceous Ocean (pre-66 Ma) was characterized by abundant elasmobranch denticles, but low abundances of fish teeth. The Palaeogene Ocean (66-20 Ma), initiated by the Cretaceous/Palaeogene mass extinction, had nearly four times the abundance of fish teeth compared with elasmobranch denticles. This Palaeogene Ocean structure remained stable during the Eocene greenhouse (50 Ma) and the Eocene-Oligocene glaciation (34 Ma), despite large changes in the overall accumulation of both groups during those intervals, suggesting that climate change is not a primary driver of ecosystem structure. Dermal denticles virtually disappeared from open ocean ichthyolith assemblages approximately 20 Ma, while fish tooth accumulation increased dramatically in variability, marking the beginning of the Modern Ocean. Together, these results suggest that open ocean fish community structure is stable on long timescales, independent of total production and climate change. The timing of the abrupt transitions between these states suggests that the transitions may be due to interactions with other, non-preserved pelagic consumer groups.
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