Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Ecol Lett. 2020 Mar;23(3):439-446. doi: 10.1111/ele.13441. Epub 2019 Dec 18.
Leigh Van Valen famously stated that under constant conditions extinction probability is independent of species age. To test this 'law of constant extinction', we developed a new method using deep learning to infer age-dependent extinction and analysed 450 myr of marine life across 21 invertebrate clades. We show that extinction rate significantly decreases with age in > 90% of the cases, indicating that most species died out soon after their appearance while those which survived experienced ever decreasing extinction risk. This age-dependent extinction pattern is stronger towards the Equator and holds true when the potential effects of mass extinctions and taxonomic inflation are accounted for. These results suggest that the effect of biological interactions on age-dependent extinction rate is more intense towards the tropics. We propose that the latitudinal diversity gradient and selection at the species level account for this exceptional, yet little recognised, macroevolutionary and macroecological pattern.
Leigh Van Valen 曾有句名言：在恒定条件下，灭绝概率与物种年龄无关。为了检验这一“恒灭律”，我们开发了一种新的深度学习方法来推断年龄相关的灭绝，并对 21 个无脊椎动物类群跨越 4.5 亿年的海洋生物进行了分析。我们发现，在超过 90%的情况下，灭绝率随年龄显著下降，这表明大多数物种在出现后不久就灭绝了，而那些幸存下来的物种经历了不断降低的灭绝风险。这种年龄相关的灭绝模式在赤道附近更为明显，而且即使考虑到大规模灭绝和分类膨胀的潜在影响，这种模式也是成立的。这些结果表明，生物相互作用对年龄相关灭绝率的影响在热带地区更为强烈。我们提出，纬度多样性梯度和物种层面的选择解释了这种特殊但鲜为人知的宏观进化和宏观生态模式。
