Scale dependence of drilling predation in the Holocene of the northern Adriatic Sea across benthic habitats and nutrient regimes

Predation has strongly shaped past and modern marine ecosystems, but the scale dependency of patterns in drilling predation, the most widely used proxy for predator-prey interactions in the fossil record, is a matter of debate. To assess the effects of spatial and taxonomic scale on temporal trends in the drilling frequencies (DF), we analyzed Holocene molluscan assemblages of different benthic habitats and nutrient regimes from the northern Adriatic shelf in a sequence stratigraphic context. Although it has been postulated that low predation pressures facilitated the development of high-biomass epifaunal communities in the eastern, relatively oligotrophic portion of the northern Adriatic shelf, DFs reaching up to 30-40% in the studied assemblage show that drilling predation levels are comparable to those typical of Late Cenozoic ecosystems. DFs tend to increase from the transgressive systems tract (TST) into the highstand systems tract (HST) at the local scale, reflecting an increase i...