In long-lived lakes that existed for millions of years freshwater snails developed a particularly high diversity of species. A new study by SNSB paleobiologist Thomas A. Neubauer now shows the importance of these ecosystems for the evolution of freshwater snails on a global and deep-time scale.
Snails are a stroke of luck for paleontologists: because of their hard shells, these animals are very often preserved as fossils. Snails therefore form an important and well represented group of animals in the fossil record of Earth's history. Most snail species lived in the sea, but fossils of terrestrial and freshwater snails are also commonly found by paleontologists.
Neubauer, curator at the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Geology has compiled the most extensive data set to date for fossil freshwater snails in a review to identify patterns and relationships in their evolutionary history. He analyzed the global expansion and distribution of species from their early beginnings in the Carboniferous period, about 340 million years ago, to the Ice Age , about 12,000 years ago.
During the more than 7 million years of its existence, Lake Pannon was home to about 580 species and produced many unique evolutionary lineages. Today's long-lived lakes, such as Lake Ohrid in the Balkan Peninsula, Lake Baikal in Siberia, and Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika in East Africa, are comparable islands of evolution.
"These rare ecosystems are archives of evolution," Neubauer says."Their longevity—we're talking often several million years—makes them very different from most other lakes, which are often only a few thousand years old. They allow a closer look into how species change through time. Time plays the decisive role in evolution. Only in long-lived ecosystems species have enough time to 'experiment.
Long-lived lakes have influenced the diversity and distribution of freshwater gastropods worldwide. Their formation and longevity are determined by tectonic and climatic processes over millions of years. These ancient ecosystems are rare and important islands for the development of freshwater organisms—a so-called ecological opportunity, according to Neubauer, where animals and plants have been able to flourish undisturbed over long periods of time and continue to do so today.
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