在整个显生宙时期，生态系统工程师的存在都促进了海洋生物多样性的发展

1. 信息

2. 摘要

Phanerozoic marine biodiversity dynamics have been shaped by continuous environmental change and biotic interactions. Although ecosystem engineers – animals whose behaviours modify resource availability – have established impacts on modern community ecology and diversity, their impacts on ancient ecosystems over geologic time have remained quantitatively underexplored. Here, we investigate how biodiversity was impacted by reef-building or bioturbating ecosystem engineers at each stage of the Phanerozoic, including their ability to maintain biodiversity over mass extinctions, and identify extrinsic conditions that modulate their impacts. We analyse fossil communities with and without ecosystem engineers to calculate effect sizes, thereby quantifying the effects of the presence of ecosystem engineers on Shannon’s Diversity ( H ) at each stage in the Phanerozoic. We show that ecosystem engineers are significantly associated with increased biodiversity during the majority of the Phanerozoic. We also show that, over the last ~250 million years, the effectiveness of modern-type reef-builders is more sensitive to climate-driven stress than for modern-style bioturbators. Finally, our results reveal that climate may modulate ecosystem engineer impacts, with both bioturbators and reef-builders exhibiting the strongest effect sizes within an optimal moderate temperature range. These results underscore ecosystem engineers’ crucial role in contributing to fluctuating biodiversity dynamics over the Phanerozoic.

3. 图表

4. 引用

@article{cribb2026,
  author = {Alison T. Cribb and Simon A. F. Darroch and William Gearty},
  title = {Marine biodiversity was greater in the presence of ecosystem engineers throughout the Phanerozoic},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  year = {2026},
  volume = {17},
  number = {1},
  pages = {9166},
  doi = {10.1038/s41467-026-73628-6},
  publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},
}