Brombacher Anieke, Searle-Barnes Alex, Mulqueeney James M, Standish Christopher D, Milton J Andy, Katsamenis Orestis L, Watson Richard A, Trueman Clive, Sinclair Ian, Wilson Paul A, Foster Gavin L, Ezard Thomas H G
School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO14 3ZH, United Kingdom.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Jul 8;122(27):e2421549122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2421549122. Epub 2025 Jul 3.
The fossil record provides the most powerful evidence of large-scale biodiversity change on Earth, but it does so at coarse and often idiosyncratic temporal scales. One critical problem that arises concerns the evolutionary consequences of individual environmental experience. Individuals respond to their environment instantaneously, whereas the resolution of most fossil records aggregates multiple paleoenvironments over time scales beyond individual lifespans. Therefore, the presence of phenotypic plasticity in deep time and the extent of its influence on macroevolution remain poorly understood. Using coupled computed tomography and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry protocols, we studied the environmental dependence of developmental trajectories across three sister species of macroperforate planktonic foraminifera. A foraminiferal shell preserves all stages of the individual's ontogeny, as well as the environmental state experienced throughout its lifetime. Generalized additive mixed effect (GAMM) models show that somatic growth rates differ among the three species and that these are inversely correlated with calcification temperature, as reconstructed from Mg/Ca measurements through ontogeny. This environmental dependence varies among species: The thermal sensitivity of individual chamber-to-chamber growth rates of and is double that seen in . In contrast, no such environmental signal was recovered for architectural shape traits. Our integrated approach is widely applicable and demonstrates that detecting developmental plasticity in the fossil record is feasible. Extrapolating these techniques in deep time promises to revolutionize our understanding of the ways in which environmentally associated trait variation drove the diversification of life on Earth.
化石记录为地球上大规模生物多样性变化提供了最有力的证据，但它是在粗略且往往特异的时间尺度上做到这一点的。由此产生的一个关键问题涉及个体环境经历的进化后果。个体对其环境会立即做出反应，而大多数化石记录的分辨率是在超过个体寿命的时间尺度上汇总多个古环境。因此，深层时间中表型可塑性的存在及其对宏观进化的影响程度仍知之甚少。我们使用计算机断层扫描和激光烧蚀电感耦合等离子体质谱联用方法，研究了三种大孔浮游有孔虫姐妹物种发育轨迹的环境依赖性。有孔虫的壳保留了个体个体发育的所有阶段，以及其一生中经历的环境状态。广义相加混合效应（GAMM）模型表明，这三个物种的体细胞生长速率不同，并且这些速率与钙化温度呈负相关，钙化温度是通过个体发育过程中的Mg/Ca测量重建的。这种环境依赖性在物种之间有所不同： 和 的个体室间生长速率的热敏感性是 的两倍。相比之下，未从结构形状特征中发现此类环境信号。我们的综合方法具有广泛的适用性，并表明在化石记录中检测发育可塑性是可行的。将这些技术外推到深层时间有望彻底改变我们对与环境相关的性状变异推动地球上生命多样化方式的理解。
