Dead Shells Bring to Life Baselines for Conservation: Case Studies from The Bahamas, Southern California, and Wisconsin, USA

We are living in a time of rapid biodiversity loss. Numerous studies have shown that modern extinction rates are higher than pre-human background rates. However, these studies of biodiversity decline almost exclusively focus on large vertebrates. The scientific community lacks the sufficient long-term records necessary to track biodiversity loss for many invertebrate taxa. However, aquatic, benthic, and skeletonized invertebrates have the advantage of leaving a long-term record that can readily be sampled in conjunction with living communities because the mineralized skeletons accumulate in the very same sediments in which the animals that produced them once lived. These not-quite-fossil “death assemblages” contain an underutilized record for long-term monitoring. Here, we leverage three case studies of calcareous micro- and macro-faunal remains from three aquatic environments spanning two gradients: freshwater to fully marine and polluted to pristine and remediated. We compared the death assemblages to living assemblages in these case studies using Spearman’s rho and the Jaccard–Chao agreement to determine the degree of fidelity. Death assemblages of lacustrine, calcareous microcrustaceans (Ostracoda), collected from lakes in The Bahamas and Wisconsin, USA, faithfully record human impacts, both for degradation and remediation, as determined by a mismatch in the live–dead comparisons. Likewise, the live–dead comparisons of calcareous marine macrofauna (Bivalvia) from the southern California shelf also indicate human impact, including pollution and remediation. These case studies demonstrate how death assemblages can be used to gauge the changes in community assembly and population structures at local and regional scales, even in the absence of a systemic monitoring program. Conservation, restoration, and biomonitoring efforts would benefit from the inclusion of live–dead comparisons of taxa with easily fossilized, identifiable parts. Live–dead studies, such as those presented in these case studies, can be used as tools for recognizing targets and establishing baselines for conservation, tracking community responses to remediation efforts, and identifying local species extinctions.