Dormancy as a Superpower
Many organisms spend a portion of their lives in a state of metabolic suppression. There are different terms for metabolic suppression depending on how long it lasts and what triggers it, so ‘dormancy’ will be used here for simplicity. Dormancy can act like a sort of superpower, allowing organisms to avoid environmental extremes, to persist for years to millennia or more before reviving, and to passively travel across the globe. How widespread this strategy is in the ocean, and what its effect is on the fate of species and ecosystems in the marine realm is largely unknown, though tantalizing evidence suggests it may have affected survivorship across the last great mass extinction. Dormancy is a focus of lab members Elly Goetz and Zach Miller and is a growing research area for the lab.
Upper Limits of Heat Stress
As the world warms by a few degrees, larger areas of the planet will begin to experience periods of extreme high temperatures and humidity (i.e., high wet bulb temperatures) exceeding the internal body temperatures of endotherms like us. This is a deadly combination, as endotherms must dissipate heat in order to avoid heat stress and death. Puzzlingly, most of the last 100 million years have been much hotter than the present day (~5-15°C warmer globally) yet fossils of endotherms, like mammals and dinosaurs, are found in low to mid latitudes. It is unclear how this was possible, and yet these same mechanisms may help us better predict the future of species today in a much warmer future. Understanding communities and heat stress in hot climates is a focus of Kat Schroeder and is a growing research area for the lab.
Establishing Baselines for Community Dynamics
The natural world is a dynamic place. The weather constantly changes. Seasons come and go. Some years the plume tree in my mother in-law’s garden drops cartloads of fruits and other years there are none. While it intuitively seems that humanity’s impact on the world is unprecedented –we have, after all, profoundly influenced more than 75% of the ice free land surface (among many others)—it is actually very difficult to compare modern day dynamics to those in the fossil record. In the fossil record, we ‘see’ community dynamics integrated over years to millions of years and just in a few well fossilized groups and environments, in comparison to our ability to monitor species communities on the scale of days to weeks in the modern day. Celli Hull is co-lead and founder of the BioDeepTime project, an international consortium, working to combine empirical records across scales, with the theoretical and analytical framework necessary to quantify the relative dynamics of modern and ancient communities. Understanding community dynamics across scales in planktonic foraminifera is a focus of Maoli Vizcaíno.
Warm and Warming Climates
The fossil record can provide case studies in how the earth system, and the life it supports, respond to intervals of prolonged –or abrupt—environmental change. Paleoceanography and paleoclimatology are the sciences of reconstructing past oceans and climates, respectively, and a focus of many in the lab has been to do just this during various intervals in the last 100 million years. Importantly, the oceans, climates, and dynamics of these past intervals hold many surprises that challenge how we model the behavior of the climate system. Understanding these ancient intervals is critical if we are to model our future world correctly. Currently, Liz Brabson and Jenn Kasbohm have been leading our paleoclimatological efforts to understand Pliocene and Miocene oceans and climates. These relatively recent warm intervals with modest to no significant northern hemisphere glaciation, have atmospheric CO2 concentrations similar to today (i.e., >400ppm)
Ecology and Evolution
Many of the biologically inclined in the Hull lab focus on fundamental questions of ecology and evolution as they relate to the evolution, extinction, and persistence of species and ecosystems on this wonderful planet earth. Research in this theme can relate to understanding the natural history of individual species to illuminate general processes or to understanding the morphology and morphological dynamics of species to investigate ecological and evolutionary dynamics and their drivers. Anieke Brombacher is leading our current efforts focused on the distribution and traits of Recent to Pliocene planktonic foraminifera.
Mass Extinctions
Every once in a while, our biosphere has experienced environmental and/or biotic changes that were wide-spread and profound enough to cause a massive, global, die-off in species. These events are rare, but they punctuate the history of life and change its trajectory so markedly that we divide the fossil record into major intervals across the biggest of these events. Since the start, research in the Hull lab has returned to mass extinctions, particularly the most recent of the great mass extinctions (the Cretaceous Paleogene mass extinction, 66 million years ago), to understand how and why the events occur and what it means for the survivors in the aftermath. Our newest lab member, Wyatt Petryshen is exploring questions related to mass extinctions in his dissertation research.