Community hydrodynamics created ecological opportunity in Ediacaran shallow marine ecosystems

Abstract The ‘second wave’ of Ediacaran evolution (∼558–548 Ma) was characterized by the appearance of macroscopic organisms in shallow marine settings, where they formed communities with high morphological and ecological diversity, including new and more complex modes of life. Based on analogy with modern marine ecosystems, these early shallow water communities could have substantially modified local hydrodynamic conditions and influenced resource availability, but we know very little about how they interacted with their fluid environment at larger spatial scales. Here, we use computational fluid dynamics to investigate the hydrodynamics of different shallow marine Ediacaran communities based on fossil surfaces from Russia and South Australia. Our results reveal considerable hydrodynamic variability among these communities, ranging from unobstructed flow, to enhanced mixing, to very low in-canopy flow. This variability represents a noticeable shift from the more conserved hydrodynamic conditions reconstructed for older Ediacaran communities from deep water settings. The variation in how shallow marine Ediacaran communities affected local hydrodynamics could have given rise to notable differences in the distribution of crucial water-borne resources such as organic carbon and oxygen. We therefore hypothesize that increasing variability in community hydrodynamics was an important source of habitat heterogeneity during the late Ediacaran. On long timescales, this heterogeneity may have helped sculpt ecological opportunity, fostering the radiation of animals.