Bioerosion

Excerpt

In his study of the erosion of steep cliffs around Huntington Sound in Bermuda by excavating sponges, Neumann (1966) defined the term bioerosion as the removal of consolidated material or lithic substrate by direct action of organisms. Soon after the term, bioerosion, was introduced, geologists and biologists described many different types of bioeroding organisms including algae, bacteria, foraminifera, sponges, bryozoa, annelid worms, barnacles, gastropods, bivalves, echinoderms, fish, and mammals. The process of bioerosion was also reported from many different marine and non-marine environments ranging from mountain slopes to the tops of deep sea knolls, and from rocky intertidal zones and coral reefs to the flanks of continental shelves. Bioerosion has also been reported from climatic zones extending from tropical and subtropical to the subarctic and arctic. Several different types of experiments have been devised for studying the rates of bioerosion by different types of organisms and in different environments. Although bioerosion was first recorded for living sponges in the intertidal zone, evidence for bioerosion was also found in the ancient rocks extending back at least to the Silurian. …