Nudibranchs that exclusively eat scleractinian corals provide a rare opportunity to study specialist predation in the marine environment. To measure the diet breadth of 4 Phestilla species on Guam, we offered the nudibranchs different corals in choice and no-choice feeding assays. Larval preferences were determined by measuring the percent metamorphosis in response to different coral species. W...

Performance in one stage of a complex life cycle may affect performance in the subsequent stage. Animals that start a new stage at a smaller size than conspecifics may either always remain smaller or they may be able to "catch up" through plasticity, usually elevated growth rates. We study how size at and date of metamorphosis affected subsequent performance in the terrestrial juvenile stage an...

Metamorphosis is a developmental strategy used by only a small number of extant fishes and little is known about its phylogenetic development during the evolution history of this large group of vertebrates. The present report provides a putative evolutionary history of metamorphosis in the lamprey, an extant agnathan with direct descendancy from some of the oldest known vertebrates. The study r...

Evolutionary transitions in larval nutritional mode have occurred on numerous occasions independently in many marine invertebrate phyla. Although the evolutionary transition from feeding to nonfeeding development has received considerable attention through both experimental and theoretical studies, mechanisms underlying the change in life history remain poorly understood. Facultative feeding la...

There is a general agreement concerning the influence of the thyroid upon the metamorphosis of anuran amphibian larvae. All a~thors who reported experiments on feeding thyroid to tadpoles, regardless of the locality in which they were carried on and on whatever species of anura they were performed, invariably found that thyroid feeding always resulted in a precocious metamorphosis. The experime...

Metamorphosis is both an ecological and a developmental genetic transition that an organism undergoes as a normal part of ontogeny. Many organisms have the ability to delay metamorphosis when conditions are unsuitable. This strategy carries obvious benefits, but may also result in severe consequences for older larvae that run low on energy. In the marine environment, some lecithotrophic larvae ...