Diversity of gut microbiome in Rocky Mountainsnail across its native range.

The animal gut microbiome is often a key requirement for host nutrition, digestion, and immunity, and can shift in relation to host geography and environmental factors. However, ecological drivers of microbiome community assembly across large geographic ranges have rarely been examined in invertebrates. Oreohelix strigosa (Rocky Mountainsnail) is a widespread land snail found in heterogeneous environments across the mountainous western United States.

Gut microbiome of century-old snail specimens stable across time in preservation.

Background: Museum biological specimens provide a unique means of gathering ecological information that spans wide temporal ranges. Museum specimens can also provide information on the microbial communities that persist within the host specimen. Together, these provide researchers valuable opportunities to study long-term trends and mechanisms of microbial community change.

The enigma of Oligocene climate and global surface temperature evolution.

Falling atmospheric CO levels led to cooling through the Eocene and the expansion of Antarctic ice sheets close to their modern size near the beginning of the Oligocene, a period of poorly documented climate. Here, we present a record of climate evolution across the entire Oligocene (33.9 to 23.

Oxygen, temperature and the deep-marine stenothermal cradle of Ediacaran evolution.

Ediacaran fossils document the early evolution of complex megascopic life, contemporaneous with geochemical evidence for widespread marine anoxia. These data suggest early animals experienced frequent hypoxia. Research has thus focused on the concentration of molecular oxygen (O) required by early animals, while also considering the impacts of climate.

Sixty-one thousand recent planktonic foraminifera from the Atlantic Ocean.

Marine microfossils record the environmental, ecological, and evolutionary dynamics of past oceans in temporally expanded sedimentary archives. Rapid imaging approaches provide a means of exploiting the primary advantage of this archive, the vast number of fossils, for evolution and ecology. Here we provide the first large scale image and 2D and 3D shape dataset of modern planktonic foraminifera, a major microfossil group, from 34 Atlantic Ocean sediment samples.

Towards a morphological metric of assemblage dynamics in the fossil record: a test case using planktonic foraminifera.

With a glance, even the novice naturalist can tell you something about the ecology of a given ecosystem. This is because the morphology of individuals reflects their evolutionary history and ecology, and imparts a distinct 'look' to communities--making it possible to immediately discern between deserts and forests, or coral reefs and abyssal plains. Once quantified, morphology can provide a common metric for characterizing communities across space and time and, if measured rapidly, serve as a powerful tool for quantifying biotic dynamics.

The thermal stress response to diel vertical migration in the hyperiid amphipod Phronima sedentaria.

The hyperiid amphipod Phronima sedentaria experiences a temperature change of 15 °C during diel migration in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific (ETNP) from 8-10 °C at depth to 25-27 °C at night in the surface waters. The aim of this study was to determine if the natural temperature gradient experienced by P. sedentaria results in a thermal stress response.