what, if anything, is environmental micropaleontology?

Environmental Micropaleontology,
Microbiology and Meiobenthology,
2004, Vol.1, pp. 1-10
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS ENVIRONMENTAL
MICROPALEONTOLOGY?
Ronald E. Martin
Department of Geology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 U.S.A.
Environmental micropaleontology is represented by two basic approaches: geological and biological.
The geological approach consists of disciplines such as stratigraphy, sedimentology, and paleontology,
especially taphonomy, the science of the formation and preservation of fossil assemblages. Although
the quality of the fossil record has typically been viewed as a drawback because of erosion and nondeposition,
the process of time-averaging actually provides a more accurate view of long-term average
environmental conditions than do short-term sampling protocols. The biological approach involves
ecology and organismal biology, including the cellular responses of living representatives of microfossil
taxa to pollution and other environmental disturbances. Thus, as has often been the case, the geological
approach views the modern environment primarily from a pre-anthropogenic perspective, whereas the
biological approach is seemingly concerned with only the modern environment. Nevertheless, the two
approaches strongly overlap, are highly interdisciplinary, and feed into one another in terms of posing
research questions and protocols designed to test hypotheses about the state of the environment. Given
the trends in the biological sciences away from ecology and organismal biology, traditional disciplines
of biology are devolving onto paleontologists. Coupling these biological disciplines with geological
ones that emphasize near-surface processes represents a tremendous opportunity for the emerging field
of environmental micropaleontology.
Key words: environmental micropaleontology
INTRODUCTION
At the recent North American Micropaleontology Convention held in
Berkeley (NAPC2001), Valentina Yanko-Hombach organized the session, "Future
of Micropaleontology: Application to Environmental Problems?" A prime topic of
the discussion during the session was the nature and scope of environmental
micropaleontology, given its rapid growth in recent years (Yanko-Hombach, 2001).
Several times during the discussion, Dr. Yanko-Hombach mentioned Jere Lipps's
(1981) paper: "What, if anything, is micropaleontology?" Valentina kindly invited
me to write this article as a followup to the session's discussion, and I have
corrupted the article's title from Lipps's paper. A fundamental theme of Lipps's
(1981) paper was that ther term "micropaleontology" is really an umbrella for a
diverse set of disciplines.
What, then, is environmental micropaleontology? What are workers doing,
and where is the field headed? How do the different disciplines rely upon one
another to produce "synergies" of interest to funding agencies and industry? What
are the employment opportunities? What sorts of preparation should environmental
micropaleontologists have? My intent is not to present an exhaustive review, but to
briefly offer some opinions of the field (from the viewpoint of a micropaleontologist
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trained as a protozoologist), recent trends, and the relationships of its disciplines.
Although the examples discussed involve foraminifera, the themes apply to the
entire field of environmental micropaleontology.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF APPLIED MICROPALEONTOLOGY
In order to answer the questions posed above, we must understand how
applied micropaleontology developed. One of the earliest applications of
micropaleontology occurred in 1877, when foraminifera were used to date strata in a
water well near Vienna, Austria. Further studies followed in the U.S. by J. A.
Udden of Augustana College (Illinois) in 1911, J. A. Cushman, and J. J. Galloway.
In the United States, these studies helped establish micropaleontological laboratories
that developed biostratigraphic zonations for the correlation of well logs and, later,
seismic datums through the rest of the 20 th century (e.g., Lipps, 1981; see also
Stuckey, 1978). During the decades following World War II, studies of
foraminiferal distribution boomed, as oil companies began to move their exploration
efforts offshore. These efforts required detailed paleobathymetric data of modern
settings that could be used in the analysis of cuttings from industrial wells that
drilled mostly Cenozoic sections. Many of the early distributional studies were
summarized by Phleger (1960), and later updated by Murray (1973, 1991).
During this time, Bandy and colleagues were among only a handful of
workers who examined the response of foraminifera to pollution. Bandy et al.'s
studies lay dormant, probably because the environmental movement had not yet
fully developed and because of the continued emphasis of micropaleontology in
petroleum exploration. Recently, however, there have been strong signals that
applied micropaleontology has shifted from resource exploration and exploitation
toward resource conservation and environmental remediation. In the past few years,
two international conferences on Environmental Micropaleontology were held in
Tel Aviv (1997) and Winnipeg (2000), with a third scheduled for Vienna (2002),
where applied micropaleontology began. A book of contributed papers has also
appeared (Martin, 2000a; see also Scott et al., 2001).
Macropaleontologists have also recognized the value of the environmental
movement to their discipline. A Geological Society of America Penrose
Conference entitled "Linking Spatial and Temporal Scales in Paleoecology and
Ecology" was held in 1998 that was noteworthy for its audience: paleontologists
seasoned with a sprinkling of ecologists interested in ecological processes that may
occur over geological scales of time (see Cohen, 1998, for review). Another session
of interest to the paleontological and environmental communities held at
NAPC2001 was "New Uses for the Dead: Paleobiological Contributions to
Conservation Biology." Recent papers also indicate a strong interest in applying
paleontology to solve environmental problems (e.g., Kowalewski, 2001;
Kowalewski et al., 2000).

What, If Anything, Is Environmental Micropaleontology? 3
THE ADVANTAGES OF THE FOSSIL RECORD
Microfossils are ideally suited to studies of anthropogenic environmental
impacts because of the same traits that make them so well-suited to biostratigraphy
and petroleum exploration: short generation times that allow quick responses to
environmental disturbance and high abundances in small samples. The preanthropogenic
record also potentially provides baseline data that can be used to
assess the impact of, say, deforestation and eutrophication on estuaries and other
coastal systems; the organization and resilience of biological communities to
disturbance; and the occurrence of alternative community states in response to
environmental disturbance, both natural and anthropogenic (e.g., Scheffer et al.,
2001). These sorts of investigations are not just academic: they hold important
implications for ecosystem conservation and management (Martin, 2000b; Murray,
2000a).
Nevertheless, despite the growing use of microfossils to monitor modern
environments, to many workers the quality of the fossil record itself remains an
obstacle to environmental assessment. The geologic record has been viewed as
hopelessly flawed ever since the time of Lyell and Darwin for two main reasons.
First, on long scales of geologic time, gaps of variable duration occur because of
erosion and non-deposition that may confound the record of evolutionary processes.
The second major flaw was thought to be the process of time-averaging.
Time-averaging is the mixing of hardparts of different generations and habitats by
physical and biological reworking of fossils; hardparts may also undergo diagenesis
or in some cases completely dissolve before final burial (Martin, 1999a,b).
Consequently, it was thought to be impossible for any record of short-term
ecological processes to be preserved in the fossil record.
However, recent studies demonstrate that the fossil record is a rich source
of information about the pre-anthropogenic state of the environment, especially over
time scales much longer than those normally considered by ecologists. In fact,
time-averaging has come to be viewed positively because it can actually enhance
the expression of ecological signals by filtering short-term noise. Short-term
population (high-frequency) phenomena such as seasonal changes in abundance are
often lost in the subfossil record, but that is advantageous if one is interested in
longer-term processes that occur on decadal-to-centennial scales. Time-averaged
assemblages are more likely to be representative of long-term environmental
conditions and community dynamics because the dominance of a particular set of
environmental parameters increases with time while short-term--and potentially
unrepresentative--fluctuations are damped or filtered out. For example, high loss
rates in death assemblages mainly apply to the ecologically most transient parts of
communities; thus, some death assemblages appear comparable to the results of
repeated biological surveys that document changes in community species
composition and diversity over several decades or more, including sudden
phenomena that might be missed by short-term sampling regimes (Kidwell and
Bosence, 1991; Behrensmeyer and Chapman, 1993; Kidwell and Flessa, 1995).
Recently, Martin et al. (in press A) were able to resolve sea-level curves
from marsh foraminiferal assemblages of Delaware Bay by artificially timeaveraging
assemblages (Hippensteel et al., 2000). This technique mimicked the

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process of natural time-averaging by summing seasonal counts of live and dead tests
over a span of 2-3 years. The resulting environmental curves exhibited a
remarkable similarity to previously-published curves from Connecticut (also based
on foraminifera), and implicate regional climate mechanisms acting on decadal-tocentennial
scales as opposed to local changes in sedimentation and geomorphology.
This is not the first time that the application of non-traditional counting techniques
has been used to resolve subtle changes in environmental conditions in microfossil
(e.g., Martin and Liddell, 1989) or vertebrate assemblages (see Martin, 1999a, for
review). Further experimentation with counting techniques, which can be evaluated
against long-standing traditional methods, may continue to yield subtle
environmental information that may otherwise be missed by standard enumeration
procedures.
LIVE VERSUS DEAD: WHICH TO USE?
The issue of the enumeration of shells, such as the use of total (dead+living)
counts of foraminiferal tests, remains a contentious one among
micropaleontologists. Should only dead shells be counted or only live? Or both?
The answer does not seem to be as simple as the terms "live," "dead," and "total"
suggest. Some workers are adamant that only dead remains should be used because
living populations fluctuate too much to be reliable indicators of environmental
conditions (see also Murray, 2000b). However, the sea-level curves resolved by
Martin et al. (in press A) were resolved using total assemblages; the use of death
assemblages alone produced inferior results (cf. Scott and Medioli, 1980). Also,
numerous studies of both deep-sea and marsh foraminifera indicate that large living
populations exist well below the sediment-water interface, and can make substantial
contributions to death assemblages (e.g., Loubere et al., 1989; Goldstein et al., 1995;
Patterson et al., 1999; Hippensteel et al., 2000, and in press; Martin et al., in press
B). Indeed, in resolving sea-level curves, Martin et al. (in press A) used
assemblages from throughout the marsh's "taphonomically active zone" (TAZ),
which spanned 0-60 cm; analogs from other depths (e.g., 0-2 cm, 30-60 cm)
produced inferior results.
The transition from living populations to death assemblages of foraminifera
typically involves the loss of rare or fragile species, and not the dominant
components of an assemblage (e.g., Martin and Wright, 1988). Nevertheless, to
ignore the processes of preservation during the transition from living populations to
death assemblages is to ignore a whole untapped realm of high-resolution
information. Death assemblages can be viewed as the summation of discrete inputs
of shells (Figure 1; Martin, 1999a). Once inputs have occurred, shell inputs tend to
decay, and older pulses of shells decay before younger ones. Not surprisingly, then,
14 C-dated shells of death assemblages tend to consist of a strong peak of the most
recent shell inputs with a tail skewed toward shells of greater age (Figure 1; Flessa
et al., 1993; Flessa and Kowalewski, 1994; Martin et al., 1995, 1996; Olszewski,
1999). Thus, living populations may make a substantial contribution to the
corresponding death assemblage right up until the assemblage is finally buried and
taphonomic processes largely cease. For example, Hippensteel et al. (in press)

What, If Anything, Is Environmental Micropaleontology? 5
demonstrated that seasonal inputs of living foraminifera to marsh death assemblages
impart a "memory" to the assemblages about precipitation, which affects porewater
chemistry and foraminiferal preservation prior to final burial; the "memory" of
Figure 1 The incremental formation of fossil assemblages. Death assemblages are formed
by incremental inputs of dead hardparts from living populations following reproductive
pulses (left side of diagram, T1-T5). As new inputs are added, the oldest inputs largely
decay (right side of diagram). Consequently, the histogram of hardpart ages primarily
represents relatively young shells, but is strongly skewed toward greater ages. Thus, not
only do time-averaged fossil assemblages represent long-term average conditions, they are
also comprised of the most recent shell inputs that occurred before final burial.
assemblages changes with interannual changes in precipitation patterns, both long
and short-term (e.g., drought versus tropical storms).
THE BIOLOGY OF MICROFOSSILS
Fossil and subfossil remains of course have their living counterparts:
organisms, which are represented by populations belonging to different species.
Countless numbers of studies, frequently under highly controlled culture
conditions, have been conducted on living protists by protozoologists. However,

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Martin
important microfossil taxa to the paleontologists to pursue studies of parasitism
and disease (see also Lipps, 1981); ecological studies of protists have often
emphasized the ciliates, most of which do not secrete fossilizable hardparts. In
recent years, cell biologists have largely abandoned the protista, with the
exception of easily cultivated experimental strains used in molecular studies.
Consequently, the study of the cellular responses of foraminifera and other
important microfossil taxa to pollutants is really only beginning (e.g., Bresler and
Yanko, 2000). In order to understand these responses, the scope of environmental
micropaleontology must include microbiology, cytology, cell biology, biochemistry,
and toxicology, among other disciplines.
SO WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL MICROPALEONTOLOGY?
Figure 2. Some relationships between the geological and biological approaches of
environmental micropaleontology and their subdisciplines. Both approaches strongly
overlap, are highly interdisciplinary, and therefore feed into one another in terms of
research hypotheses and environmental evaluation.
A lot, apparently (Figure 2). Environmental micropaleontology involves
traditional aspects of geology such as sedimentation and stratigraphy, along with
paleontology, and especially taphonomy, hybridized with biological disciplines such
as ecology, cell biology, toxicology, and biochemistry.

What, If Anything, Is Environmental Micropaleontology? 7
The geological and biological approaches are not just complementary; they
are highly interdisciplinary and feed into one another in terms of research
hypotheses and environmental evaluation (Figure 2; e.g., papers in Martin, 2000a).
For example, inferences regarding the effects of pollutants and other disturbances on
living representatives of microfossils can and should be corroborated or refuted by
baseline conditions inferred from the subfossil record prior to possible
anthropogenic impact. Do, for example, test deformities increase toward the present
in response to heavy metal pollution, or are about the same numbers of test defects
found in fossil and modern assemblages? How do geochemical indicators behave in
relation to the frequency of test deformities? How has the chronology and
downcore distribution of microfossils been affected by time-averaging, differential
preservation, and bioturbation? If there is a correlation between test deformities and
pollutants, what is the observable cellular response as seen, say, in the electron
microscope? Conversely, environmental recovery in response to remediation efforts
can be assessed by comparing modern assemblages with those downcore.
However, in formulating interdisciplinary research hypotheses and the
protocols necessary to test them, environmental micropaleontology is faced with a
conundrum. Because biologists relegated paleontologically important taxa to the
paleontologists, little else is known about the biology of paleontologically important
groups other than their distribution with respect to basic physical factors such as
temperature, salinity, and substrate. Furthermore, taphonomy has only recently
begun to blossom as a science. Thus, environmental micropaleontology is faced
with the task of developing its own syntheses from case studies, which have only
recently begun (see papers in Martin, 2000a; cf. Arnold, 2001). This situation is not
unlike the proliferation of distributional studies of foraminifera in the 1950's and
'60's that eventually led to broader syntheses. The task is daunting but nevertheless
exciting, given the tremendous research opportunities that present themselves.
HOW SHOULD WE TRAIN STUDENTS?
So how do we train students--including ourselves--in environmental
micropaleontology? If the field continues to gain momentum, some sort of
adjustments to university curricula might seem advisable, although they might not
be feasible given the resistance they might encounter. On the other hand, the field
of environmental micropaleontology is so broad and so interdisciplinary that it may
well be inadvisable to promote a standardized curriculum. All that can be said with
any certainty is that environmental micropaleontologists should obtain as broad a
background as possible in either core geological or biological disciplines. The
geological aspects would include, but are not limited to micropaleontology,
sedimentation, stratigraphy, and sedimentary geochemistry. With the exception of
pollen records, however, there are very few if any stratigraphic datums available for
correlation during the Holocene, so familiarity with 14 C dating and the use of
radiotracers such as 214 Pb and 137 Cs to calculate sedimentation rates becomes
paramount in studying preanthropogenic conditions. The formation of death
assemblages (taphonomy) also requires an understanding of sedimentary
geochemistry. Geologists and micropaleontologists must also be familiar with

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Martin
surficial geologic processes and climatology, as well as remote sensing techniques
such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), CHIRPS, and GIS. The potential effects
of biological mixing on the resolution of stratigraphic signals has also received
increased attention recently, and requires statistics, quantitative analysis, and
possibly numerical modeling (Martin, 1999a,b). The biological approach might be
two-pronged, emphasizing ecology and organismal biology. Nevertheless,
ecologists working on microfossils would still need background in microbiology,
cytology, cell biology, biochemistry, and toxicology, and organismal biologists
would have to have some expertise in ecology.
Moreover, to avoid the chasms that have so long existed between
geologists, paleontologists, and biologists, students must also be cognizant of
principles and developments in complementary approaches (Figure 2). Geologists
may not need to be intimately familiar with organic and biochemistry, but they
ought to at least be familiar with the organismal biology and ecology of the
microfossil taxa they work on. Conversely, biologists may not need to know the
origins of the entire geologic time scale, nor the nuances of biostratigraphic
zonation, but they ought to be versed in the fundamentals of sedimentation and
stratigraphy, including facies and the principles of correlation.
CONCLUSION: UNITY IN DIVERSITY
Given the continuing trends in the biological sciences toward genetic
manipulation and away from ecology and organismal biology, more and more
traditional disciplines of biology are devolving onto paleontologists. Many of us
who are concerned about biodiversity and environmental quality have watched these
changes occur slowly but surely over the past decades, and are saddened by this
state of affairs. However, the changes in the scope of these sciences represents an
outstanding opportunity for interdisciplinary approaches, rather than the often
fragmented nature of research that has long characterized the study of present and
ancient environments. Whatever happens, though, we must continue to do the
following: emphasize micropaleontology as a discipline essential to the
environmental sciences in the real world, and carry the emphasis to funding
agencies, both current faculty at our own institutions and new hires, and the
classroom. As the geosciences continue to emphasize environmental applications
and more traditional research disciplines fade, micropaleontologists must emphasize
the growing importance of their discipline in addressing environmental issues.
Selfishly, the profession of micropaleontology can only benefit, but so too can the
environment.
Acknowledgements
Much of my research and a number of my students have been supported by
the National Science Foundation. My thanks to Valentina Yanko-Hombach for the
invitation to write this column.

What, If Anything, Is Environmental Micropaleontology? 9
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