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Journal of Paleontology

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Parasitic Polychaetes in the Early Cretaceous Hydrocarbon Seep-Restricted Brachiopod Peregrinella Multicarinata

¹ Institut für Geowissenschaften, Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Ludewig-Meyn-Str. 10, 24118 Kiel, Germany, and Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Box 37012, Washington DC 20013-7012, USA, <steffen.kiel@gmx.de>

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	INTRODUCTION

 
HYDROTHERMAL VENTS and methane seeps sustain unique ecosystems with a highly adapted fauna that largely thrives on chemotrophic endosymbionts. This large biomass attracts not only predators but also parasitic taxa like the recently reported oophagous bivalve Acesta bullisis Vokes, 1963 that lives permanently attached to a vestimentiferan tube worm (Järnegren et al., 2005). Here I report large brachiopods of the Early Cretaceous seep-restricted genus Peregrinella Oehlert, in Fischer, 1887 that were infested by polychaete tubes inside their shells during their lifetime.

Many Paleozoic and Mesozoic vent and seep communities were dominated by brachiopods, yet their ecologic role in these ecosystems remains elusive (Campbell and Bottjer, 1995b; Campbell and Bottjer, 1995a; Sandy, 1995; Peckmann et al., 2007). Several of these brachiopod taxa appear to be endemic to vents and seeps, and their mass occurrence combined with their often large size makes the analogue to chemosymbiotic bivalves like modern Calyptogena Dall, 1891 or Bathymodiolus Kenk and Wilson, 1985 an attractive hypothesis. However, chemosymbiosis has never been demonstrated for brachiopods found at Recent vents or seeps (Campbell and Bottjer, 1995a; Barry et al., 1996; Zezina, 2000), thus from a uniformitarian point of view, chemosymbiosis in extinct brachiopods is doubtful.

The dimerelloid rhynchonellid Peregrinella is the largest Mesozoic brachiopod, with a diameter exceeding 10 cm, and it has been found exclusively in Early Cretaceous hydrocarbon seep deposits ranging from North America to Europe and Tibet (Campbell and Bottjer, 1995b; Gaspard, 1999; Campbell, 2006). Peregrinella often co-occurs with serpulid tubes (‘Serpula recta’; see Campbell and Bottjer [1995b] for a compilation), but such tubes have never been described from the interior of the shell. Several authors made serial grindings or thin sections of Peregrinella (i.e., Biernat, 1957; . . . [Full Text of this Article]