A University of Victoria micropaleontologist found that marine plankton may act as an early alert system before a mass extinction occurs.

With help from collaborators at the University of Bristol and Harvard, Andy FraassB次元官网网址� newest paper in the Nature journal shows that after an analysis of fossil records showed that plankton community structures change before a mass extinction event.

B次元官网网址淥ne of the major findings of the paper was how communities respond to climate events in the past depends on the previous climate,B次元官网网址� Fraass said in a news release. B次元官网网址淭hat means that we need to spend a lot more effort understanding recent communities, prior to industrialization. We need to work out what community structure looked like before human-caused climate change, and what has happened since, to do a better job at predicting what will happen in the future.B次元官网网址�

According to the release, the fossil record is the most complete and extensive archive of biological changes available to science and by applying advanced computational analyses to the archive, researchers were able to detail the global community structure of the oceans dating back millions of years.

A key finding of the study was that during the B次元官网网址渆arly eocene climatic optimum,B次元官网网址� a geological era with sustained high global temperatures equivalent to todayB次元官网网址檚 worst case global warming scenarios, marine plankton communities moved to higher latitudes and only the most specialized plankton remained near the equator, suggesting that the tropical temperatures prevented higher amounts of biodiversity.

B次元官网网址淐onsidering that three billion people live in the tropics, the lack of biodiversity at higher temperatures is not great news,B次元官网网址� paper co-leader Adam Woodhouse said in the release.

Next, the team plans to apply similar research methods to other marine plankton groups.

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