Integrating function across marine life cycles

Integrating function across marine life cycles.

Complex life cycles involve a set of discrete stages that can differ dramatically in form and function. Transitions between different stages vary in nature and magnitude; likewise, the degree of autonomy among stages enabled by these transitions can vary as well. Because the selective value of traits is likely to shift over ontogeny, the degree of autonomy among stages is important for understa...

Complex life cycles and offspring provisioning in marine invertebrates.

Offspring size can have pervasive effects throughout an organism's life history. Mothers can make either a few large or many small offspring, and the balance between these extremes is determined by the relationship between offspring size and performance. This relationship in turn is thought to be determined by the offspring's environment. Recently, it has become clear that events in one life-hi...

Mechanisms of biotic resistance across complex life cycles.

Biotic resistance is the ability of communities to inhibit the establishment, spread or impact of novel species. However, the interactions that underlie biotic resistance depend heavily on the contexts in which species interact. Consequently, studies of biotic resistance that consider single processes, patches, species or life-history stages may provide an incomplete picture of the capacity for...

Life Cycles

Local disturbance cycles and the maintenance of heterogeneity across scales in marine metapopulations.

In marine systems, the occurrence and implications of disturbance-recovery cycles have been revealed at the landscape level, but only in demographically open or closed systems where landscape-level dynamics are assumed to have no feedback effect on regional dynamics. We present a mussel metapopulation model to elucidate the role of landscape-level disturbance cycles for regional response of mus...