Planktic foraminifera are microscopic marine organisms whose calcium carbonate shells provide valuable insights into past ocean conditions. A promising means of understanding foraminiferal ecology and their environmental interactions is to constrain their key functional traits relating to feeding, symbioses, motility, calcification and reproduction. Here we review what we know of their functional traits, key gaps in our understanding and suggestions on how to fill them.

Planktic foraminifers are a plankton whose fossilised shell weight is used to reconstruct past environmental conditions such as seawater CO₂. However, there is debate about whether other environmental drivers impact shell weight. Here we use a global data compilation and statistics to analyse what controls their weight. We find that the response varies between species and ocean basin, making it important to use regional calibrations and consider which species should be used to reconstruct CO₂.

We conducted a meta-analysis of known experimental literature examining how marine bivalve growth rates respond to climate change. Growth is usually negatively impacted by climate change.  Bivalve eggs/larva are generally more vulnerable than either juveniles or adults. Available data on the bivalve response to climate stressors are biased towards early growth stages (commercially important in the Global North), and many families have only single experiments examining climate change impacts.

Planktic foraminifera are marine-calcifying zooplankton; their shells are widely used to measure past temperature and productivity. We developed ForamEcoGEnIE 2.0 to simulate the four subgroups of this organism. We found that the relative abundance distribution agrees with marine sediment core-top data and that carbon export and biomass are close to sediment trap and plankton net observations respectively. This model provides the opportunity to study foraminiferal ecology in any geological era.

Changes in morphology during development can have profound impacts on an organism but are hard to quantify as we lack preservation in the fossil record. As they grow by adding chambers, planktic foraminifera are an ideal group to study changes in growth in development. We analyse four different species of Jurassic foraminifers using a micro-CT scanner. The low morphological variability suggests that strong constraints, described in the modern ocean, were already acting on Jurassic specimens.