Collaborative Research: Evolutionary Significance of Biotic Interactions: A Comparative Study Utilizing Echinoid Associated Traces

捕食者通常会在猎物的骨骼上留下明显的痕迹，包括牙印、骨折、疤痕和钻孔。含有这些独特印记的化石可以用来探索数百万年来捕食者的角色。迄今为止，对捕食化石记录的研究主要集中在软体动物身上：蜗牛、蛤蜊和它们的亲戚。拟议中的项目将把捕食的历史扩展到软体动物之外，并评估捕食对海胆、沙美元和其他棘纲动物的影响。棘足类动物是一种重要的商业动物，也是许多海洋捕食者的主要食物来源。本项目旨在建立一个识别捕食者在棘足类动物猎物上留下的痕迹的全球参考系统，有望促进现代和古代生态系统中棘足类动物的研究。一旦完成，该数据库将用于研究过去1亿年里捕食者对棘足类动物进化的影响，在此期间，它们已经多样化并成为海洋生物圈的重要组成部分。新生物博物馆的收藏与文献将被用来编纂影响现代棘足类动物的各种类型的相互作用（捕食、寄生、共生等）的痕迹特征。由此产生的数据库将包括痕迹制造者的身份/生态、受影响的棘类动物的身份/生态/系统发育以及痕迹的形态、频率和分布的数据。然后，该数据库将用于探索化石记录，并评估有关影响棘足类动物生态和进化历史的生物相互作用的选择类型的相对进化重要性的假设。结果将通过博物馆活动、中学生活动包和佛罗里达自然历史博物馆教育者资源计划的教学工具公开。

Predators often leave distinct marks on prey skeletons, including tooth marks, fractures, scars, and drill holes. Fossils that contain those distinct marks can be used to explore the role of predation over the span of millions of years. To date, research on the fossil record of predation has centered mainly on mollusks: snails, clams, and their relatives. The proposed project will expand the history of predation beyond mollusks, and assess the impact of predation on sea urchins, sand dollars, and other echinoids. Echinoids are a commercially important group of animals and a major food source for many marine predators. This project aims to develop a global reference system for identifying traces left by predators on echinoid prey, which is expected to stimulate echinoid research on both modern and ancient ecosystems. Once assembled, the database will then be used to study the impact of predators on the evolution of echinoids over the last 100 million years, during which, they have diversified and become a critical part of the marine biosphere.Neontological museum collections in conjunction with the literature will be used to codify trace characteristics of various types of interactions (predation, parasitism, commensalism, etc.) that affect modern echinoids. The resultant database will include data on the identity/ecology of trace makers, identity/ecology/phylogeny of affected echinoids, and morphology, frequency, and distribution of traces. The database will then be used to explore the fossil record, and evaluate hypotheses regarding the relative evolutionary importance of select types of biotic interactions affecting the ecology and evolutionary history of echinoids.Results will be publicly available through museum activities, activity kits for middle school students, and teaching tools in the Florida Museum of Natural History Educator Resource program.