Landscape modifications produce a myriad of long-lasting ecological and cultural legacies. In some cases, such practices may necessitate the need for proprietorship systems and cooperation among actors and institutions, particularly if these modifications lead to more favorable habitats. In Tampa Bay, Indigenous shell-terraforming generated conditions more suitable for tidal wetland habitats that descendants would have benefited from. We suggest that the recognition of ancestrally engineered landscapes may have been a motivator for negotiating sea tenure systems during public events like mound building. To explore this, we examine variations in mollusk size, species compositions, and oyster geochemistry between domestic and public contexts from five precolonial sites in two sub-basins in the Tampa Bay Estuary to elucidate potential harvesting regulations and tenure systems used in the management of mollusks between ca. AD 200 and 1000. Many of the observed differences in species composition and shell size between public and domestic contexts were minor. Still, dissimilarities in the season and environment of oyster harvests within and between site contexts were stronger and provided insights into shellfishing, site formations, and intra-site variation in ceremonialism that may reflect sea tenure systems. We interpret these patterns as resilient and flexible management institutions that spanned almost a millennium and contributed to sustainable oyster harvests and the persistent occupation of two villages fronting ancestrally generated estuarine sub-basins.

Aim Restoration benchmarks often assume an undisturbed historic range of variability, if they include historic information at all. However, recent research highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of shifting baselines and how to best incorporate past variabilities in modern management. We investigate trends in oyster size through time (ca. 250-2024 ce) and space (ca. 1000 km2) in the Tampa Bay Estuary to understand when and where ecologically significant changes to oyster populations occurred. By implementing a multiscalar approach, this study contributes historical ecological data relevant to contemporary restoration and management efforts and provides insights into understanding long-term socioecological dynamics in Florida's largest open-water estuary.Location Tampa Bay Estuary, Florida, USA.Time Period ca. 250-2024 ce.Taxon Mollusca; Crassostrea virginica.Methods We measured sizes of over 15,000 oyster shells from archaeological sites and contemporary reefs across four estuarine sub-basins over approximately 2000 years to assess how mean and maximum shell sizes responded to shifts in climate and human harvesting and settlement patterns.Results We demonstrate a non-linear decline in oyster sizes through time, including a steep decline in oyster size prior to European colonization and commercial harvest. Changes in oyster size varied across sub-regions, and there was no consistent response to climatic variability. A moderate rebound in oyster size during the 19th century is evident and coincides with several social factors that alleviated harvest pressures for a relatively short period. However, most of the largest contemporary oysters remain significantly smaller than those in the deeper past.Main Conclusions Archaeological datasets provide relevant historical ecological information for understanding modern era declines in molluscs. Our data reveal that no single baseline exists for oyster size in Tampa Bay. Instead, oyster populations responded in complex ways to climatic variability, ecological stressors and human interactions. Oyster size is a valuable functional trait linked to reproduction and reef resilience, and management targets that reference past demographic states should be framed as dynamic ranges and evaluated at sub-regional scales.

The emergence of Neogastropoda in the Early Cretaceous and its rapid radiation in the Mid-Cretaceous remain poorly understood due to the extremely limited number of their early fossils. This is why each record from that critically important interval is essential for documenting the early history of the order, as well as for studies utilizing molecular clocks to test hypotheses about evolutionary rates and timing. Here, we describe a new vasid species, Fimbrivasum bulgaricum sp. nov., with a preserved protoconch and a shell morphology with prominent ornamentation and characteristic columellar folds. The specimen also exhibits the earliest occurrences of some functional traits, such as varices and a labral tooth, in Neogastropoda. This finding suggests a much earlier origin of the family Vasidae than previously believed, dating it as the Barremian. It also indicates that neogastropod diversification was well underway in the earliest Cretaceous. We also review the earliest records of living neogastropod superfamilies and their diversification in the Cretaceous showing that the fossil record does not fit well with the molecular phylogeny in the current state of knowledge highlighting the poor fossil record of the group outside of Europe and the United States, and challenges in identification of early members of particular clades.

In 2022, the accepted name for a marine gastropod species from Florida until then known as Conus anabathrum Crosse, 1865, was replaced by C. floridanus Gabb, 1869. The main argument was that the type of C. anabathrum, a specimen with no type locality in the description, actually represents the eastern Pacific species C. scalaris Valenciennes, 1832. This allocation of the type of C. anabathrum to an eastern Pacific taxon was based on several factors, with shell shape as the main determinant. We demonstrate via geometric morphometrics that the type of C. anabathrum actually falls outside the morphospace of C. scalaris, belonging instead to the morphospace of the Floridian taxon. We also discuss other arguments presented to assign the type of C. anabathrum to the eastern Pacific species. These discussions and our geometric morphometric analytical results demonstrate that the type of C. anabathrum actually represents the Floridian species, and that C. anabathrum should be the accepted name.

Marine species assessments rely heavily on baseline surveys conducted after the 1960s, long after many anthropogenic pressures began, which could lead to misinformed management decisions and poor conservation outcomes. In this study, we collaborated with Florida Fish and Wildlife to conduct stock assessments for mollusks of the west Florida shelf that incorporate shell death assemblages. One of our first assessments was of the Florida Fighting Conch, Strombus alatus, an abundant gastropod that is also under consideration as a replacement fishery for the threatened Queen Conch. Live and dead shells were collected from >300 dredge tows between 2008-2018 covering the entire west Florida shelf. Shells were age-partitioned by 14C- and AAR-calibrated taphonomic criteria. Counts were converted to densities per m2. Inverse distance weighting interpolation of S. alatus death assemblages reveals multiple population centers along the coast and a rapid decrease in density with depth from 25-120 m. In contrast, live conchs were absent in our dredge samples from shelf depths deeper than 40 m. These differences are confirmed by single-visit occupancy methods that account for variation in detectability across the samples. Live-dead differences in spatial distribution are probably influenced by time averaging in death assemblages, which increases detectability of conchs in deeper habitats, where they may be too rare to be sampled alive. However, extirpation of offshore populations was also indicated by independent natural history collection occurrence records, which show numerous live-collected conchs from 1940-1980 but none afterwards, despite an increase in sampling effort. These results suggest that live-dead comparisons can reveal biodiversity loss at the scale of large marine ecosystems.

Florida is one of the largest exporters of aquarium ornamental species in the world, but trade is expanding to include harvest of herbivorous invertebrates that play important ecological roles in nature, such as grazing algae from seagrass and corals. Here, stable isotope sclerochronology is used to document life history traits of two of the most intensely harvested herbivorous gastropod species in Florida, the turbinids Lithopoma americanum and Turbo castanea. Such information is critical to assessing whether current harvest intensities are sustainable. Populations of L. americanum and T. castanea in Florida consist of rapidly maturing individuals that reach maximum sizes within 2 y and 1 y, respectively. Rapid maturation should allow these populations to recover rapidly from intense harvest, but short-lived species are also intrinsically susceptible to population collapse from recruitment failure, complicating effective management of the fishery. In addition, the short lifespans of these turbinids suggest that hobbyists may purchase replacement animals frequently, increasing fisheries pressure on natural ecosystems.

This talk will describe the work of the CPN Pre-Impact Baselines Working Group to leverage the wealth of paleoecological and historical ecological data to facilitate estimation of pre-impact species distribution baselines. Species conservation has long focused on preventing human-driven extinctions, and over the past 50 years conservation success has been measured using changes in species’ extinction risk. However, recently calls have been made for a parallel focus on species recovery, and on developing metrics with which to assess its achievement. This call to action within the conservation community is fuelled in part by the recognition that baselines of species abundance and distribution have shifted dramatically across human generations with globally detectable human impacts on ecosystems beginning at least several thousand years ago. While assessment of extinction risk generally only considers species’ change over the past few decades, assessment of recovery requires considering change over centuries to millennia. This requires identifying the baseline status at the time when humans first became a major factor influencing the abundance and distribution of a species. Two new frameworks for considering conservation status relative to a species’ pre-impact baseline have been recently released: EPOCH (Evaluation of POpulation CHange), and the IUCN Green Status of Species. These frameworks have been lauded as moving conservation in a much-needed direction, but there is also concern about whether these methods will be applicable to any but a few well-known, charismatic species. Using a combination of modelling approaches, we are working to estimate species pre-impact distributions in a way that is accessible to conservation practitioners, helping to unshift the baseline and bring species recovery into the mainstream.

Marine habitats are in decline due to increasing anthropogenic pressures, but baseline data on species distributions needed to manage and conserve populations are lacking. Incorporating death assemblages into species assessments can create a more accurate understanding of pre-anthropogenic communities than survey records alone. In this study, we conducted a live-dead analysis on mollusks from a new 2008-2018 dredge survey in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. We selected the predatory banded tulip snail, Cinctura hunteria, as a test case for assessment because this species is one of several designated by the Florida Fish and Wildlife as a species of concern. Using spatial count data for shells in our samples, we estimated density values for each taxonomic grade over the sampled area using IDW spatial interpolation. These maps reveal large areas of occupation across the west Florida shelf for two taxonomic grades of dead shells but loss of offshore occurrence for live records. One explanation for the lack of occurrences in offshore habitats is that, unlike dead shell records, there is no time averaging accumulation of live shells. Time averaging increases detectability of species in habitats where they are rare. However, independent fisheries data from live-only animal surveys not only mirror our live-dead results but suggest that habitat loss in our live-dead comparisons was rapid and occurred in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Thus, live-dead comparisons reveal both natural baselines as well as anthropogenic changes in distribution without being significantly distorted by time-averaging biases. Including live-dead data can greatly improve species assessments when long-term survey records are unavailable and provide a key tool in combatting biodiversity loss across marine ecosystems.

Several families of neogastropod mollusks independently evolved the ability to drill through mineralized prey skeletons using their own mineralized feeding teeth, sometimes with shell-softening chemical agents produced by an organ in the foot. Teeth with more durable tooth shapes should extend their use and improve predator performance, but past studies have described only the cusped-side of teeth, mostly overlooking morphologies related to functional interactions between teeth. Here, we describe the three-dimensional morphology of the central drilling tooth (rachidian) from four species of the neogastropod family Muricidae using synchrotron tomographic microscopy and assemble a three-dimensional model of a multitooth series in drilling position for two of them to investigate their dynamic form. We find two new types of articulating surfaces, including a saddle joint at either end of the rachidian and a large tongue-and-groove joint in the center. The latter has a shape that maximizes contact surface area between teeth as they rotate away from each other during drilling. Articulating joints have not been described in Neogastropod radula previously, but they are consistent with an earlier hypothesis that impact forces on individual teeth during predatory drilling are dispersed by tooth-tooth interactions.

A flaperon belonging to Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 washed ashore on Réunion Island covered with the barnacle Lepas anatifera in July 2015, more than a year after the plane's disappearance. Here, we report the first high‐precision δ 18 O calcite versus temperature relationship for L . anatifera reared under laboratory conditions to unlock clues to the flaperon's drift path and origin. Using this experimental relationship and known growth rates for L . anatifera , we also demonstrate a new method for (a) converting δ 18 O data for one of the MH370 barnacles into a dated time series of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) experienced during the last part of the flaperon's drift and (b) identifying best fits between the observed flaperon SST time series and 50,000 SST histories generated from a particle‐tracking simulation. Our new method identifies a flaperon drift path far south of a previous isotope‐based reconstruction. We conclude with specific recommendations for using our method to continue the search for MH370 and other applications.

New marine mollusc fishery resources are constantly being incorporated to the international market. The marine gastropod Buccinanops cochlidium (Dillwyn, 1817) is a potential fisheries resource with excellent nutritional qualities. Recently, the first legislation that regulates marine gastropod fisheries based on size limits and reproductive seasonality was established in Argentina, although some biological parameters that are useful to its implementation are still needed. Fisheries managed with size limits require accurate estimates of age and growth that can be estimated through stable isotope sclerochronology. The age and growth of B. cochlidium at Playa Villarino, in north Patagonian gulf San Jose, Argentina was studied between 2005 and 2006. The delta O-18 profiles of B. cochlidium shells analyzed in this study showed a maximum age of 5 y. Opercular rings and shell growth breaks, which record age in some other gastropods, gave higher counts than the number of years shown in isotope profiles. Thus, morphological proxies are unable to correctly asses age and growth in B. cochlidium. These results are useful to support and complement the first fisheries regulation of marine gastropods recently implemented in Argentina, aimed to conserve this vulnerable and valuable resource.

The Florida Horse Conch, Triplofusus giganteus, one of the largest marine gastropods in the world, has been intensely exploited by shell collectors, curio dealers, and commercial harvest for over a century and is now in decline. Effective management of horse conch populations requires better data on commercial and recreational harvest intensities but also on the species' intrinsic capacity to recover. Here, we use stable oxygen and carbon isotope sclerochronology to investigate the horse conch's life history, including its maximum life span, growth rates, age at first spawning, and number of lifetime spawning seasons. The largest two shells studied (460 and 475 mm linear shell length) grew for 13 and 11 years, respectively. Growth curves for these shells, extrapolated out to the length of the record size shell (606 mm linear shell length) predict a maximum age of just 16 years. Carbon isotopes and field photographs of spawning females suggest that females mature relatively late in life. However, the largest horse conchs remaining in the wild are also smaller and younger than those studied here. Thus, the largest females left in the wild could have few lifetime spawning events. High fecundity can buffer horse conchs from overfishing but only if females reach spawning age and reproductive-age females are protected. Our study highlights the usefulness of stable isotope sclerochronology for characterizing the life histories of molluscan species now too uncommon to study through traditional mark and recapture approaches.

Few paleotempestological studies have focused on coastal sinkholes, a common feature in Florida, which can receive and preserve storm overwash sediments. The major goal of this research is to improve our understanding of the characteristic signatures of storm sediments in sinkholes thereby determining reliability of these environments as proxies for hurricanes. Hurricane Irma as a category 5 storm provides an excellent case study for characterizing storm deposits in sinkholes on Big Pine Key. We cored at four sinkholes along a 350 m transect normal to the shoreline. Core sediments were characterized using physical description, short-lived radioisotope dating, sediment grain size analysis, loss-on-ignition, microfossil analysis, and x-ray fluorescence elemental analysis. We found that Irma deposits had higher abundances of marine foraminifera, less total organic matter and elevated Si/Al and Ca/Ti ratios, compared to pre- or post-Irma sediments. In addition, there was a thinning of the storm sediments along the inland transect. Consequently, we propose that sinkholes, particularly those that are closer to the shoreline, can provide reliable sites for paleotempestology studies.

Microbiome data are undergoing exponential growth powered by rapid technological advancement. As the scope and depth of microbiome research increases, cross-disciplinary research is urgently needed for interpreting and harnessing the unprecedented data output. However, conventional research settings pose challenges to much-needed interdisciplinary research efforts due to barriers in scientific terminologies, methodology and research-culture. To breach these barriers, our University of South Florida OneHealth Codeathon was designed to be an interactive, hands-on event that solves real-world data problems. The format brought together students, postdocs, faculty, researchers, and clinicians in a uniquely cross-disciplinary, team-focused setting. Teams were formed to encourage equitable distribution of diverse domain-experts and proficient programmers, with beginners to experts on each team. To unify the intellectual framework, we set the focus on the topics of microbiome interactions at different scales from clinical to environmental sciences, leveraging local expertise in the fields of genetics, genomics, clinical data, and social and geospatial sciences. As a result, teams developed working methods and pipelines to face major challenges in current microbiome research, including data integration, experimental power calculations, geospatial mapping, and machine-learning classifiers. This broad, transdisciplinary and efficient workflow will be an example for future workshops to deliver useful data-science products.

The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) is home to the world's largest remaining wild oyster fisheries, but baseline surveys needed to assess habitat condition are recent and may represent an already-shifted reference state. Here, we use prehistoric oysters from archaeological middens to show that oyster size, an indicator of habitat function and population resilience, declined prior to the earliest assessments of reef condition in an area of the GoM previously considered pristine. Stable isotope sclerochronlogy reveals extirpation of colossal oysters occurred through truncated life history and slowed growth. More broadly, our study suggests that management strategies affected by shifting baselines may overestimate resilience and perpetuate practices that risk irreversible decline.

Widely used sclerochronological methods for biologically aging fossilized oysters, such as delta O-18 and Mg/Ca analyses, are costly, time-consuming, and not always practical for population-level analyses. A method that relies on visible morphological features, such as growth bands, to determine the lifespan of Crassostrea virginica would provide a cost-efficient and reliable alternative. Previous studies have assessed whether counting growth bands can be used to biologically age C. virginica from the southeastern U.S. but have produced conflicting results. For this study, we conducted subseasonal sclerochronological analyses on Pleistocene C. virginica from the mid-Atlantic U.S. to determine whether growth band counting could be used to reliably measure oyster lifespan. A highly significant correlation exists between delta O-18 peaks and major (annual) grey growth bands in these oysters. Major grey and white growth bands differ significantly with respect to delta O-18 values. These data suggest that, for C. virginica from the Pleistocene of the mid-Atlantic U.S., major grey growth bands are accreted during the colder months of the year and can be used as annual markers to biologically age specimens. The results presented here differ from previous studies that reported no link between growth bands and delta O-18 values, possibly because the latter focused on lower latitude regions with different seasonal temperature regimes and sampled only the early stages of growth, which contain morphological features that could be confused with major growth bands. While growth band counting of oysters shows promise as a method for biologically aging oysters that experience high seasonal temperature variability, future studies are needed to assess its applicability over a broader geographic range.

Trophic interactions between the native gastropod predator Trophon geversianus and the invasive barnacle Balanus glandula may have facilitated the successful expansion of the barnacle along rocky intertidal coastlines in Argentina. In this study, through field observations and a stable isotope reconstruction of the diet of T. geversianus, we assessed whether and how frequently this drilling muricid gastropod consumes the invasive B. glandula on a Patagonian rocky shore. Field observations indicated that B. glandula and T. geversianus co-occur in the middle intertidal. Feeding observations and stable carbon and nitrogen isotope dietary reconstructions showed that T. geversianus readily and successfully consumes B. glandula, but at low rates (4% of diet) relative to native mussel prey, which compete with B. glandula for space. This study shows that T. geversianus exerts little top-down control on this invasive barnacle on Patagonian rocky shores. The success of B. glandula on these shores is plausibly enhanced directly by this weak interaction and indirectly by the preference of T. geversianus for native prey rather than the absence of predators or invader immunity from predation. The results of this study complement previous studies that have shown that tolerance to extreme desiccation stress in harsh intertidal environments is crucial for the establishment of B. glandula.

Edge drilling by the muricid gastropods Chicoreus dilectus and Phyllonotus pomum has been observed in the laboratory under conditions simulating an enemy-rich environment, and evidence for it is found in Florida’s Pliocene fossil record. However, this behaviour has never been observed in the wild and was presumed to be ecologically extinct for the last two million years. This study documents for the first time expression of enemy-induced edge-drilling behaviour in the wild by C. dilectus and P. pomum. These observations are based on a multi-year survey between 2002 and 2015 in St Joseph Bay, Florida, a coastal lagoon in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. Edge drilling was not recorded in 2002 in St Joseph Bay, but expression of edge-drilling behaviour was confirmed by direct observation for both species and two stations in the bay between 2007 and 2011. Edge-drilling predation traces produced by C. dilectus and P. pomum accounted for more than half of all their drilling attacks in bulk samples collected in 2007, with the frequency of occurrence in bulk samples declining at both stations over time. Intensive sampling along the west Florida shelf over the same time interval failed to find any other unambiguous evidence for expression of edge drilling by these species. St Joseph Bay has the highest densities of predators and lowest prey survival rates in the region and also highest secondary productivity in any seagrass habitat globally, confirming the use of edge drilling by C. dilectus and P. pomum as an indicator of Florida’s ‘enemy hotspots’ and their fates in modern times and in the fossil record. The re-emergence of enemy-induced edge drilling by C. dilectus and P. pomum in Florida after two million years, but only in St Joseph Bay, suggests the presentday ecology of the bay is unique on geological time scales.

The Ocenebrinae is a subfamily of marine predatory gastropods known as oyster and mussel drills. Their current phylogenetic framework is traditionally based on shell and radular characters, but a consensus on relationships among genera is still lacking. We investigated the molecular phylogeny of Ocenebrinae using 50 species and DNA data from one nuclear (28S) and two mitochondrial (COI and 16S) genes, the largest data set so far assembled for this subfamily. We found support for the monophyly of the Ocenebrinae, and species were divided into four major lineages. Within groups, genera had similar geographic distributions, suggesting that except in a few cases, species diversification within clades occurred without range expansions. We discuss the phylogenetic distribution of a labral tooth and a sealed siphonal canal, two characteristic ocenebrine features. We also show that Ocinebrina species in the north‐eastern Pacific are not monophyletic with north‐eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean species, and that the Ocinebrina edwardsii species complex belongs to Ocenebra.