What is it about?
Larval dispersal in a coastal southern Australian marine snail follows a pattern of isolation by distance, suggesting that it is much lower than expected on the basis of the species' very long larval dispersal phase.
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Why is it important?
Near-shore currents are rarely invoked as the drivers of population connectivity in regions dominated by large offshore boundary currents. This paper shows that particularly in regions where the boundary currents are far from the coast, they play only a minor role in facilitating larval dispersal because few of the larvae that reach them ever return to the coast to settle.
Perspectives
This is the first 'seascape genetics' publication from our group, an approach that links high-resolution genetics with oceanographic modelling. Genetic structure between sites is often too small to apply methods to directly infer gene flow (even for polymorphic microsatellite data). The seascape genetic approach allows identifying which of a number of simulated scenarios explains the observed genetic structure best.
Prof. Peter R Teske
University of Johannesburg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On-shelf larval retention limits population connectivity in a coastal broadcast spawner, Marine Ecology Progress Series, July 2015, Inter-Research Science Center,
DOI: 10.3354/meps11362.
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