a question for 🧪🦑 : what is an example of an extinct species for which we know a lot about the species it associated with? e.g. its parasites, prey, predators, symbiotic relationships, basically any other species that would have been impacted by its extinction? - ThreadSky

sabs.bsky.social • 151 days ago

a question for 🧪🦑 : what is an example of an extinct species for which we know a lot about the species it associated with? e.g. its parasites, prey, predators, symbiotic relationships, basically any other species that would have been impacted by its extinction?

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samurai10.bsky.social•151 days ago

Rhinos on their way to extinction.

ichnologist.bsky.social•151 days ago

For symbiosis, I recall reading more than a few dung beetles went extinct with Pleistocene megafauna extinctions in the Americas. But I'm foggy on exact references. Maybe in Paul Martin's 'Twilight of the Mammoths' (2007)? @jacquelyngill.bsky.social can likely clarify, correct, or expand on that.

kuppermann.xyz•151 days ago

don’t have a particular citation in my head but there could be useful literature here about locally extinct species and comparing similar sites where they’ve been extirpated and where they’re still present

sabs.bsky.social•149 days ago

that's a great tip, thank you!

jgcrocke.bsky.social•151 days ago

That’s a tough one! So many spp go extinct before we know even the basics about them, and the ones that get a lot of research tend to be in decline for a long time, so the impact feels small when it happens, even if, say, thylacines probably had strong top-down impacts on Tasmanian ecosystems

jgcrocke.bsky.social•151 days ago

For some other big ecosystem impacts, this paper talks about what the loss of the passenger pigeon meant for eastern US forests

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2003.00230.x

sabs.bsky.social•151 days ago

ooh thank you for sharing this, and for your thoughts!

jgcrocke.bsky.social•151 days ago

For a more parasite-y answer, try https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031182023001373

tarquinhh.bsky.social•151 days ago

Whilst its relationship with the dodo is disputed, the (still extant) tambalacoque tree of Mauritius was likely originally dependent on a number of now extinct island endemics, including giant tortoises, for seed dispersal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideroxylon_grandiflorum

jopabinia.bsky.social•151 days ago

Here's a non parasitic interaction, but it might be robust to extinction if the shells stick around...

jopabinia.bsky.social•151 days ago

Seen here as well

jopabinia.bsky.social•151 days ago

And Petrolisthes in the crab poster was found in a pile with multiple sea stars, so they might have lived together

sabs.bsky.social•149 days ago

thank you Jo, this is great!

sabs.bsky.social•151 days ago

trying to imagine a more holistic way of writing about the ripples of extinction

sophiefern.bsky.social•151 days ago

Oohh now…My friend Hamish has researched this with tapeworms and kākāpō.

The paper is in TREE 31,5, 341-343

sophiefern.bsky.social•151 days ago

Spencer and Zuk 2016

sailorwayne.bsky.social•151 days ago

Honestly, the yearly report could have announced a 200% subscription rate increase and I'd happily pay for precisely these thoughts.

dabilovbot.bsky.social•150 days ago

Uhhhh the fucking uhhhh the one rhino species that went extinct

gsjphd.bsky.social•151 days ago

So this is a recently extinct example, but the Steller's Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) seems to have acted as a keystone species in kelp forest ecosystems. Their grazing thinned out kelp fronds, allowing benthic algae to thrive. This gave benthic herbivores broader food availability, lessening

gsjphd.bsky.social•151 days ago

the impact of urchin grazing on the kelp itself (another keystone taxon) and preventing the formation of urchin barrens. This paper found that the presence of the sea cow made the ecosystems more stable against perturbation; a really cool application of iterative modeling to conservation paleo!

notting.bsky.social•151 days ago

For a single predator/prey case, there's the fish-within-a-fish fossils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiphactinus

notting.bsky.social•151 days ago

Also the theory that avocados would soon go extinct if we didn't domesticate them, because all the megafauna that spread their seeds are extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Taxonomy

notting.bsky.social•151 days ago

,... and I just re-read and realized neither of these apply to the question. Apologies for the noise!

bbofun.bsky.social•151 days ago

But still fascinating.

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

Regarding the idea that avocado seeds were dispersed by megafauna... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpcBgYYFS8o

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

Wild avocadoes are commonly eaten (and have their seeds dispersed) by the resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno)
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/2389058
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvia-Argueero/publication/227720866_Quetzal_Abundance_in_Relation_to_Fruit_Availability_in_a_Cloud_Forest_in_Southeastern_Mexico1

sabs.bsky.social•149 days ago

thanks for sharing anyway, I loved reading about that fish!

spiderdaynightlive.bsky.social•151 days ago

if anyone on this site has a lead on parasite ecology it's @the-episiarch.bsky.social

sabs.bsky.social•151 days ago

thank you!!

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

Unfortunately, parasitic and symbiotic association for extinct species are often the type of relationships we know the least about even for living species let alone extinct one. Parasites/symbionts are often small and don't leave much if any traces in fossil.

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

The ones for which we do have a good idea of their parasites/symbionts, are the species where we have found their coprolites since many gut parasites have eggs/propagules that exit the host via the faecal route. An example can be found here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0057315

gsjphd.bsky.social•151 days ago

There's an okay record of parasitic traces in mollusk shells (mostly from trematodes and spionid polychaetes) but it's all really ambiguous.

Today, gymnophallid trematode larvae make rimmed pits in clam shells and have fish or seabirds as their definitive hosts. We see similar pits long before the

gsjphd.bsky.social•151 days ago

bony fish or seabirds show up, and probably before those specific groups of trematodes evolved too. Clearly, the trace that corresponds to certain interactions today used to be formed by different interactions in the past! But we don't know HOW different, or in what ways.

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

Yes I mentioned them in here: https://bsky.app/profile/the-episiarch.bsky.social/post/3l6nxuiopi62z
and here https://bsky.app/profile/the-episiarch.bsky.social/post/3l6nxy4ermx2m

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

For more info on extinct parasites, I've written two publications on the subject of fossil parasites here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12238
and here:
https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=azItEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=FdfyCH0vUv&sig=8hDB1eBehUEn1zKbhrqkv87rXGk&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

the-episiarch.bsky.social•151 days ago

I also gave a talk for the Royal Tyrell Museum earlier this year about the subject of fossil parasites, and it makes for a concise and updated synthesis of the topics that I covered in those two publications https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaJQRcnVnY

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