Project: Collaborative Research: Constraining Planktic Foraminiferal Ecology Using Compound Specific Isotope Analysis of Amino Acids

Current climate change is unique in human history. To understand how the Earth and life on it responds to comparable change it is necessary to look millions of years in the past. A huge amount of what we know about past climate comes from the fossils of marine plankton. Specifically, a group of single-celled organisms called foraminifera. Foraminifera make tiny fossil shells which capture the chemistry of the water they grew in. As a result, they can be used to reconstruct ancient ocean waters and climate. To use the fossil shells of foraminifera to their greatest effect, the ecology of the living creature must be understood. Variables like what the foraminifera ate, what depth it lived at, and whether it had symbionts will all impact how shell chemistry is interpreted. Compound-specific nitrogen and carbon isotopes of specific amino acids (CSI-AA) represent a unique approach to study these variables in living plankton.

This proposal would test how well this approach can be applied to fossil shells. If successful, this would provide powerful ways to describe the ecology of long extinct planktic foraminifera. In doing so, one may better understand the records they hold of Earth’s past. The project broader impacts include support for a postdoctoral researcher, development of a career-opportunities workshop to introduce students from Primarily Undergraduate Institutions to geoscience research, and content contributions to a summer program for at-risk STEM transfer students at UC Santa Cruz. Specifically, this project will investigate and develop multiple aspects of CSI-AA to better understand the species-level ecology of planktic foraminifera. This is key to generating paleoclimate and paleoceanographic records that can contextualize the Ocean’s future climate and trajectory.

The proposed project will use CSI-AA to constrain three key aspects of planktic foraminiferal ecology: depth habitat, diet, and symbiosis. CSI-AA from shell-bound organics will be used in foraminifera for the first time to refine species-level inferences about these ecological traits. First CSI-AA applications in extant species will be ground-truthed using plankton tows, sediment traps, and recent sedimentary samples from the Santa Barbara Basin. Lessons learned will then be applied deeper into the fossil record to elucidate the trophic ecology of extinct foraminifera. Finally, amino acid molar ratios and racemization (the diagnostic shift between amino acid forms which occurs with fossil age) will be used to assess amino acid preservation in fossils and ultimately test the limits of this approach by targeting a suite of abundant species from the Miocene, Eocene, and Cretaceous.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.