Brachiopods were thought to have dominated deep-sea hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps for most of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, and were believed to have been outcompeted and replaced by chemosymbiotic bivalves during the Late Cretaceous. But recent findings of bivalve-rich seep deposits of Paleozoic and Mesozoic age have questioned this paradigm. By tabulating the generic diversity of the dominant brachiopod and bivalve clades–dimerelloid brachiopods and chemosymbiotic bivalves–from hydrocarbon seeps through the Phanerozoic, we show that their evolutionary trajectories are largely unrelated to one another, indicating that they have not been competing for the same resources. We hypothesize that the dimerelloid brachiopods generally preferred seeps with abundant hydrocarbons in the bottom waters above the seep, such as oil seeps or methane seeps with diffusive seepage, whereas seeps with strong, advective fluid flow and hence abundant hydrogen sulfide were less favorable for them. At methane seeps typified by diffusive seepage and oil seeps, oxidation of hydrocarbons in the bottom water by chemotrophic bacteria enhances the growth of bacterioplankton, on which the brachiopods could have filter fed. Whereas chemosymbiotic bivalves mostly relied on sulfide-oxidizing symbionts for nutrition, for the brachiopods aerobic bacterial oxidation of methane and other hydrocarbons played a more prominent role. The availability of geofuels (i.e. the reduced chemical compounds used in chemosynthesis such as hydrogen sulfide, methane, and other hydrocarbons) at seeps is mostly governed by fluid flow rates, geological setting, and marine sulfate concentrations. Thus rather than competition, we suggest that geofuel type and availability controlled the distribution of brachiopods and bivalves at hydrocarbon seeps through the Phanerozoic.
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