A Review of Ecology: Current Knowledge, Open Questions, and Future Threats for an Ecosystem Engineering Polychaete.

A well-known example of marine ecosystem engineering is the annelid genus , which builds large tubes in coastal sediments worldwide. Early studies of were among the first to recognize the importance of facilitation in ecology, and has become a key marine soft-sediment application of the ecosystem engineering concept. Here, I review our current knowledge of ecology, including its natural history, ecosystem engineering effects, and trophic relationships.

Origination and immigration drive latitudinal gradients in marine functional diversity.

Global patterns in the functional attributes of organisms are critical to understanding biodiversity trends and predicting biotic responses to environmental change. In the first global marine analysis, we find a strong decrease in functional richness, but a strong increase in functional evenness, with increasing latitude using intertidal-to-outer-shelf bivalves as a model system (N = 5571 species). These patterns appear to be driven by the interplay between variation in origination rates among functional groups, and latitudinal patterns in origination and range expansion, as documented by the rich fossil record of the group.

Out of the tropics, but how? Fossils, bridge species, and thermal ranges in the dynamics of the marine latitudinal diversity gradient.

Latitudinal diversity gradients are underlain by complex combinations of origination, extinction, and shifts in geographic distribution and therefore are best analyzed by integrating paleontological and neontological data. The fossil record of marine bivalves shows, in three successive late Cenozoic time slices, that most clades (operationally here, genera) tend to originate in the tropics and then expand out of the tropics (OTT) to higher latitudes while retaining their tropical presence. This OTT pattern is robust both to assumptions on the preservation potential of taxa and to taxonomic revisions of extant and fossil species.

Global environmental predictors of benthic marine biogeographic structure.

Analyses of how environmental factors influence the biogeographic structure of biotas are essential for understanding the processes underlying global diversity patterns and for predicting large-scale biotic responses to global change. Here we show that the large-scale geographic structure of shallow-marine benthic faunas, defined by existing biogeographic schemes, can be predicted with 89-100% accuracy by a few readily available oceanographic variables; temperature alone can predict 53-99% of the present-day structure along coastlines. The same set of variables is also strongly correlated with spatial changes in species compositions of bivalves, a major component of the benthic marine biota, at the 1° grid-cell resolution.

Functional groups of ecosystem engineers: a proposed classification with comments on current issues.

Ecologists have long known that certain organisms fundamentally modify, create, or define habitats by altering the habitat's physical properties. In the past 15 years, these processes have been formally defined as "ecosystem engineering", reflecting a growing consensus that environmental structuring by organisms represents a fundamental class of ecological interactions occurring in most, if not all, ecosystems. Yet, the precise definition and scope of ecosystem engineering remains debated, as one should expect given the complexity, enormity, and variability of ecological systems.

Sublethal predation and regeneration in two onuphid polychaetes: patterns and implications.

We examined sublethal predation in the polychaete Diopatra cuprea, an important ecosystem engineer of intertidal and shallow subtidal marine sediments in the western Atlantic. D. cuprea commonly loses its antennae and portions of its anterior to predator attacks; these lost body portions are subsequently regenerated.

Tube decoration may not be cryptic for Diopatra cuprea (Polychaeta: Onuphidae).

Previous studies have suggested several adaptive functions for the decorated tube caps of Diopatra cuprea (Polychaeta: Onuphidae). We experimentally tested the hypothesis that decoration provides crypsis. A series of field experiments quantified predation-related damage done to tube caps that were (1) devoid of decoration, (2) decorated with algae, or (3) decorated with shell fragments.