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Project Progress

A series of modeling exercises conducted this year clearly indicate that the primary advantage to the size of rangeomorphs resides in there increased exposure to flow with greater height off the bottom. Rangeomorphs are thought to be osmotrophs, that like bacteria, absorb reactants that are in solution form the environment. Models of flow based on the deep-water setting recorded in the sedimentary record, as well as the spacing and height of the individual rangeomorphs, reveal that canopy flows operate in this context Fig1. In such a flow environment, the already low velocities in this deepwater setting are further reduced near the bottom. However, counter intuitively vertical mixing increases in the presence of the community. This is a function of the vortices produced in canopy flow. These are the same Kelvin-Hemholtz vortices that make fields of grain wave in the wind. The efficient mixing in the community precludes explanations for eukaryote size-advantage that envision gradients or concentration differences effective at the scale of the height of the community. Further modeling of the submillimeter diffusive boundary layer at the surface of organisms reveals that at the low velocities present in the community any incremental increase in exposure of the organism to higher velocity yields a concomitant increase in uptake rate. In this context velocity serves to mitigate the limits on uptake imposed when diffusion operates alone (called the unstirred condition in experimental biology). Thus, with the increased size provided by multicellular architecture, eukaryotes are able to escape limits that constrain prokaryotes. These results were presented at the annual GSA meeting in Minneapolis, and a manuscript will be submitted this fall.