We used literature data to compare the relative influences of body size, water temperature, food density and experimental method on laboratory derived estimates of the ingestion rates of marine fish larvae. We subsequently used these results to evaluate whether larval feeding rates in nature are likely to be food-limited. Larval dry weight, temperature and food density explained 85 % of the var...

Estimates of early-life traits of fishes (e.g. pelagic larval duration (PLD) and spawning date) are essential for investigating and assessing patterns of population connectivity. Such estimates are available for a large number of both tropical and temperate fish species, but few studies have assessed their variability in space, especially across multiple scales. The present study, where a Medit...

The aim of this paper is to provide explanations of how dietary phospholipid (PL) globally improves fish larval development, including growth and survival, digestive functions and skeletal development, and to propose optimal PL levels and sources in fish larval diets. Dietary incorporation of 8–12% PL related to dry matter (d.m.) promotes growth and enhanced survival in various species. Marine ...

The rapid decrease of several stocks of Pacific herring, Clupea pallasi, in Puget Sound, Washington, has led to concerns about the effects of industrial and nonpoint source contamination on the embryo and larval stages of this and related forage fish species. To address these concerns, the state of Washington and several industries have funded efforts to develop embryo and larval bioassay proto...

Temperature controls the rate of fundamental biochemical processes and thereby regulates organismal attributes including development rate and survival. The increase in metabolic rate with temperature explains substantial among-species variation in life-history traits, population dynamics, and ecosystem processes. Temperature can also cause variability in metabolic rate within species. Here, we ...

27 It has been known for almost 25 years now that inclusion of intact phospholipids in the diet could 28 improve culture performance of various freshwater and marine fish species. The primary 29 beneficial effect was improved growth in both larvae and early juveniles, but also increased 30 survival rates and decreased incidence of malformation in larvae, and perhaps increased stress 31 resistan...

Fish larvae, like many adult fish, swim by undulating their body. However, their body size and swimming speeds put them in the intermediate flow regime, where viscous and inertial forces both play an important role in the interaction between fish and water. To study the influence of the relatively high viscous forces compared with adult fish, we mapped the flow around swimming zebrafish (Danio ...

Defining the scale of connectivity, or exchange, among marine populations and determining the factors driving this exchange are pivotal to our understanding of the population dynamics, genetic structure, and biogeography of many coastal species. Using a high-resolution biophysical model for the Caribbean region, we report that typical larval dispersal distances of ecologically relevant magnitud...

Nursery habitats are larval or juvenile habitats that disproportionately contribute individuals to adult populations of a species. Identifying and protecting such habitats is important to species conservation, yet evaluating the relative contributions of different larval habitats to adult fish populations has proven difficult at best. Otolith geochemistry is one available tool for reconstructin...