Comments on: Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: the classic bioclaustration (Upper Ordovician of Ohio)

By: Wooster Geologists » Blog Archive » Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Embedded cornulitids from the Lower Silurian of Estonia

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:33:48 +0000

[...] Estonian paleontologist friend Olev Vinn is the expert in bioclaustrated (embedded in a living substrate) cornulitids, as you can see from the papers listed below. These [...]

By: Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:29:43 +0000

Hello Jeff! I am very pleased to get such a thoughtful response from you. It is not “wanton verbosity” at all! Tim Palmer and I discussed the “parasitic” nature (or not) of this bioclaustration many times. Our conclusion was that the tunicate (if that’s what what was) resided on and eventually in the host and likely both sucked up some of the same nutrient stream and certainly blocked a significant number of bryozoan zooids from functioning. It is indeed a kind of competition, but the residency in and on the host tissues pushed us over into the parasite category.

Is Kalyn almost done with her PhD? Good for her. I can only imagine the precision she has had to exercise with her words over the past few years.

Hope you are doing well!

By: Jeff Bowen

Jeff Bowen — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:22:29 +0000

You’re throwing the word “parasite” around an awful lot there, DW. I don’t know you to be an imprecise man with words under any circumstances so I pulled up your 1988 paper (Palmer, T.J. and Wilson, M.A. 1988. Parasitism of Ordovician bryozoans and the origin of pseudoborings. Palaeontology 31: 939-949.) and read the discussion on the use of the term “parasite” and the assumptions implied thereby. Your reasons for using that word are so thoroughly and explicitly laid out in that paper too! However, by the definition in that 1988 paper, wouldn’t EVERY encrusting competitor on a still-living sclerozoan be considered a parasite whether we can see evidence of it reflected in their scleratic fossils or not?

I don’t normally think of the guy on top in the race for elbow room in a reef as a parasite just because his feet are planted on someone else’s head. False but conveniently illustrative implications of cephalization (and pedi… ization…? and cubitization…? Yay for making up Latin-ish words ) in reef-building invertebrates aside, isn’t that just simple competition rather than parasitism? Would it not be a bad idea to label evidence of competition involving sclerozoans as parasitism just because someone always loses and someone always wins in a competition and sclerozoans, by definition, make great places to glue your “feet”?

You’ve been doing this for more decades than I have been alive and you never stop thinking. I am going to assume your understanding of these interactions are much more nuanced and well-thought-out than my simple attack here. Also, while I’m not terribly precise with my own word choices or definitions, I’m married to a soon-to-be Doctor of Philosophy… IN PHILOSOPHY! I’ve picked up the habit of nitpicking others’ word choices and definitions since that’s a lot of what philosophers seem to do Don’t tell Kalyn, Kreuzman, or Garrett Thompson I said that!

Hmm, it seems my tendency toward wanton verbosity got the better of me again…