Otolith microstructure has been shown to record valuable information about fishes including age, growth, and the timing of life history transitions, while microchemical analysis can reveal information about environmental history, dispersal, and migration. For the bluehead wrasse Thalassoma bifasciatum, a common coral reef fish on an oceanic island, we examined whether otolith chemistry could be...

Cities are increasingly the fundamental socio-economic units of human societies worldwide, but we still lack a unified characterization of urbanization that captures the social processes realized by cities across time and space. This is especially important for understanding the role of cities in the history of human civilization and for determining whether studies of ancient cities are relevan...

Many marine populations exhibit high variability in the recruitment of young into the population. While environmental cycles and oceanography explain some patterns of replenishment, the role of other growth-related processes in influencing settlement and recruitment is less clear. Examination of a 65-mo. time series of recruitment of a common coral reef fish, Stegastes partitus, to the reefs of...

Variation in density of early stages, that is, larvae and juveniles, is a major determinant of the distribution and abundance of the adult population of most marine invertebrates. These early stages thus play a key role in competitive interactions, and, more specifically, in invasion dynamics when biologically similar native and non-native species (NNS) come into contact in the same habitat. We...

Population growth involves demographic bottlenecks that regulate recruitment success during various early life-history stages. The success of each early life-history stage can vary in response to population density, interacting with intrinsic (e.g. behavioural) and environmental (e.g. competition, predation) factors. Here, we used the common reef-building coral Acropora millepora to investigate...

In the Central Red Sea, healthy coral reefs meet intense coastal development, but data on the effects of related stressors for reef functioning are lacking. This in situ study therefore investigated the independent and combined effects of simulated overfishing through predator/grazer exclusion and simulated eutrophication through fertilizer addition on settlement of reef associated invertebrate...

Archaeological settlement systems are usually analysed in terms of the relation between the rank of a settlement and its size (Zipf’s law). We argue that this approach is unreliable, and can be misleading, in application to archaeological data where the recovery rate of settlements can be low and their size estimates are often approximate at best. An alternative framework for the settlement dat...

In laboratory-based biofouling assays, the influence of physico-chemical surface characteristics on barnacle settlement has been tested most frequently using the model organism Balanus amphitrite (= Amphibalanus amphitrite). Very few studies have addressed the settlement preferences of other barnacle species, such as Balanus improvisus (= Amphibalanus improvisus). This study aimed to unravel th...

Most marine invertebrates have dispersive larvae and relatively immobile adults. These developmental stages are linked by a settlement event, which is often mediated by specific cues in bacterial biofilms. While larvae distinguish between biofilms from different environments, it remains unknown if they receive information from all, only a few or even just a single bacterial species in natural b...