Many aquatic crustaceans pass through a complex life cycle comprising a benthic juvenile-adult and a pelagic larval phase. In the study of aquatic ecology, meroplanktonic larvae are therefore considered as principal components of benthic-pelagic coupling processes. As a consequence of radical transitions of life style, larvae differ from conspecific adults in their ecology, behaviour, nutrition...

In insects, whilst variations in life cycles are common, the basic patterns typical for particular groups remain generally conserved. One of the more extreme modifications is found in some subterranean beetles of the tribe Leptodirini, in which the number of larval instars is reduced from the ancestral three to two and ultimately one, which is not active and does not feed. We analysed all avail...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.10.009 0003-3472/© 2014 The Authors. Published on behalf o SA license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-n How a colony regulates the division of labour to forage for nutritional resources while accommodating for size and demographic composition is a fundamental question in the sociobiology of social insects. In honeybees, Apis mellifera, young and ...

Many marine invertebrates with complex life cycles produce planktonic larvae that experience environmental conditions different from those encountered by adults. Factors such as temperature and food, known to impact the larval period, can also affect larval size and consequently the size of newly settled juveniles. After documenting natural variation in the size of cyprids (the final larval sta...

Although much has been done towards defining the nutritional requirements of immature forms of insects (Dougherty, 1959), very little attention has been paid to the needs of adults. Adults of many species can subsist when fed only simple sugar solutions, and this finding has led to many interesting studies of the suitability of various carbohydrates for the maintenance of adult life (see House,...

Many species of reef fishes form large spawning aggregations that are highly predictable in space and time. Prior research has suggested that aggregating fish derive fitness benefits not just from mating at high density but, also, from oceanographic features of the spatial locations where aggregations occur. Using a probabilistic biophysical model of larval dispersal coupled to a fine resolutio...

Genetic trade-offs such as between generalist-specialist strategies can be masked by changes in compensatory processes involving energy allocation and acquisition which regulation depends on the state of the individual and its ecological surroundings. Failure to account for such state dependence may thus lead to misconceptions about the trade-off structure and nature of constraints governing re...

The application of high-resolution genetic data has revealed that oceanographic connectivity in marine species with planktonic larvae can be surprisingly limited, even in the absence of major barriers to dispersal. Australia's southern coast represents a particularly interesting system for studying planktonic larval dispersal, as the hydrodynamic regime of the wide continental shelf has potenti...