Our Upcoming Speaker
Note: Meetings are Hybrid with Zoom and In-Person at the Lodge at the Birmingham Zoo

​Title: "Fossil plant pathology reveals how ancient ecosystems work"

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Speaker: Rebecca N. DeKoster, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Alabama

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Abstract:

   The study of fossil plants informs our understanding of habitats and climate conditions through time. Thus, an accurate picture of how plant communities lived and preserved in the fossil record is important in reconstructing the past. Specialized plant-insect interactions from fossil leaf material illustrate how leaf development can be gleaned from bud-feeding trace fossils on plants using digital modeling, physical models, and experimental damaging of living leaves. Analysis of these leaves provides geometric and biological criteria for evaluating bud-feeding traces in fossil leaves. We can apply similar techniques to analyze habitats more broadly. For example, Pennsylvanian insect damage from the Mazon Creek fossil deposits from Illinois helps us to understand how terrestrial food webs developed. The Mazon Creek flora exhibits low levels of herbivory diversity and intensity, mostly localized on seed ferns, indicating that a seed fern preference may have been important to the proliferation of terrestrial insect herbivory. Using standardized systems of noting plant pathology, we can compare damage to other sites and understand how these ecosystems change through time. A closer look into fossil plant pathology provides insights into how plants and herbivores interact with each other, and how both respond to changes in their environment. 

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About the Speaker:

  I am a postdoctoral researcher in paleobiology at the University of Alabama. The main focus of my research is exploring predatory and herbivory dynamics in ecosystems, and how ecological structures change in deep time.
 

Interdisciplinary approaches and techniques from paleontology, geology, biology, chemistry, and other fields help me to answer open questions about how ancient ecosystems operated and how they compare and contrast with ecosystems we see today. For example, I have published studies at the intersection of environment and ecology focused on how body fossils preserve damage sustained in life, and how that can be used to analyze ecological structure. I use techniques in ecology and physiology to understand what damage from insect herbivores and mollusk carnivores, preserved as trace fossils in the rock record, can tell us about how ancient ecosystems functioned.

To answer these open questions in paleoecology, I collaborate with scientists from the Field Museum of Natural History and at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to study exceptional plant fossils from the Mazon Creek fossil site in Illinois, with scientists at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History and the University of Bonn in Germany to study fossil leaves with preserved latex (a plant chemical defense), and with scientists at the University of California Berkley, the Ohio State University, and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to analyze the effects of marine productivity on predatory behavior in mollusk communities.

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