Coral Reefs in Crisis: The Reliability of Deep-Time Food Web Reconstructions as Analogs for the Present

The lead author of this study has previously used the REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project database to construct detailed food webs of coral reef ecosystems in several Caribbean locations, including Jamaica (see here). In this paper, the authors assess the reliability of historical reconstructions of biodiversity from the paleocommunity by simulating the fossilization of a highly threatened and disturbed modern ecosystem, a Caribbean coral reef. Using the high-resolution coral reef food web from Jamaica, the authors compared system structures of the modern and simulated fossil reefs, including guild richness and evenness, trophic level distribution, predator dietary breadth, food chain lengths, and modularity. The authors were able to use both the long history of Jamaican reef biodiversity records in museum collections and the published literature, combined with the extensive citizen scientist data collected by the REEF project. The REEF data were particularly important as they provided a current account of the composition of the reef biota. Results indicated that the overall guild diversity, structure, and modularity of the reef ecosystem remained intact. These results have important implications for the integrity of fossil food web studies and coral reef conservation, demonstrating that fossil reef communities can be used to understand reef community dynamics during past regimes of environmental change.