Stochastic nature of larval dispersal at sea

The movement of individuals across landscapes remains a fundamental process in population and community ecology. All species have developed a capacity to disperse but this process remains elusive in organisms with complex life-cycles, and none more so than in the marine environment. Here, most organisms have developed a two-phased life-cycle, leaving the risky business of dispersing through the open ocean to their very small and intractable larval offspring. To this day, quantifying dispersal patterns in marine seascapes remains a significant challenge, and yet it is critical to the way we preserve marine ecosystems and the services they provide. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Catalano et al. (2021) present one of the first longitudinal studies to demonstrate the stochastic nature of larval dispersal. Their work challenges some of our current ideas about marine population connectivity and provides new methodological insights to study its temporal dimension.

Automated summary

The movement of individuals across landscapes is a fundamental process in ecology, especially challenging in the marine environment. The two-phased life-cycle of marine organisms poses a significant challenge in quantifying dispersal patterns.