relationships may not always be directly measured, however, requiring an 

 indirect or deductive approach; for instance, we may wish to assess the effect 

 of a storm, pollution event, change in salinity, temperature, etc. on a species 

 population after the event has taken place. In the absence of data about 

 pre-disturbance rates of growth, death, and reproduction, we are totally 

 dependent on indirect techniques. This kind of after-the-fact problem is 

 common in paleoecology and promises to be an increasingly important 

 approach in pollution biology . 



Subject matter of the present article has been extracted and condensed from 

 initial drafts of a manual which is currently being prepared for the 

 Environmental Protection Agency . The purpose of this manual is to bring 

 together and organize paleoecological literature so that it may be of use to the 

 pollution biologist confronted with after-the-fact monitoring problems. 



The Skeletal Record 



Skeletonized organisms provide an opportunity for deducing ecologic 

 relationships in the past. The skeleton often contains a record of dynamic life 

 and death processes, and provides both ontogenetic and demographic 

 information. Ontogenetic data are related to the life history of an individual. 

 Grov^h rates may be resolved to a high level of resolution from mineralized 

 tissue showing growth banding correlated with lunar and/or solar cycles, or 

 seasonal changes in water temperature, salinity, day length, primary 

 productivity, etc. Biological events, such as season of reproduction and death, 

 may also be recorded. Demographic data are related to population structure 

 and its maintenance; growth, mortality, recruitment, and migration. The unit 

 of study is a single species population. In the present article, we will limit our 

 discussion to extraction of ontogenetic data. 



Paleoecologic research over the past decade has developed many techniques for 

 reconstructing paleoenviroments (30-32). Much of this literature is unknown to 

 neontologists. 



Preparation of the manual is supported by Environmental Protection Agency grant 

 R804-909-010. 



The term monitoring is used here to describe reconstruction of an organism's history 

 of growth, reproduction, and mortality as preserved in its skeletal parts. Inferences 

 about environmental causes for the observed record are, by definition, indirect and 

 deductive. 



Demography, taken literally, means writing about the people (Gr. demos, the people + 

 to write). The term was originally used to describe statistical studies of human 

 populations; births, deaths, marriages, etc. We use demography in a broader sense; the 

 statistical description of populations of any taxonomic group. 



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