A closer look at the organism inventory of any aquatic ecosystem, present or in the paleo-record, reveals a variety of potential “bio-archives”, i.e. biogenic calciumcarbonate structures. Current day sclerochronological techniques enable us to extract different kinds of information from these archives that facilitate our understanding of the organisms life history, of its environment, and to some extent of the ecosystem this organism is part of. How may such information facilitate our understanding of ecosystem function? I see three major pathways: (i) New methods and newly established proxies enable us to reveal further past environmental conditions and corresponding organism response. (ii) Accordingly, we can learn more about individual life history and extrapolate from this to population history and its potential impact on ecosystem function. And (iii), increasing analytical capacity and processing speed allows to analyze more individual archives per unit of time (or money), i.e., we may be able to tackle variability in time, space and system structure seriously. I intend to present a number of examples that highlight these different aspects.