Connectivity of marine populations: open or closed?

By R. Cowen, K. Lwiza, S. Sponaugle, Claire B Paris-Limouzy, D. Olson. Science, 2000

1,250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most marine populations are thought to be well connected via long-distance dispersal of larval stages. Eulerian and Lagrangian flow models, coupled with linear mortality estimates, were used to examine this assumption. The findings show that when simple advection models are used, larval exchange rates may be overestimated; such simplistic models fail to account for a decrease of up to nine orders of magnitude in larval concentrations resulting from diffusion and mortality. The alternative process of larval retention near local populations is shown to exist and may be of great importance in the maintenance of marine population structure and management of coastal marine resources.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab79537272a1e87df5aabbfa6ca076994d6c0b0d

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Citations in the corpus

Near-future levels of ocean acidification do not affect sperm motility and fertilization kinetics in the oyster Crassostrea gigas (2009, background): “fertilization, embryogenesis and larval development, which are not only often the most sensitive life-stage to environmental change, but which are also key for the successful recruitment – and hence survival – of the species (Pechenik, 1999; Cowen et al., 2000; Raven et al., 2005).”
Pacific Coral-reef Fishes: The Implications of Behaviour and Ecology of Larvae for Biodiversity and Conservation, and a Reassessment of the Open Population Paradigm (2002, background): “As shown by Cowen et al. (2000), over the times (average PLD) and distances involved, diffusion and mortality so reduce numbers of larvae per unit volume that it is unlikely larvae will reach distant ‘sink’ reefs in ecologically/management significant numbers.”
Distinguishing disease impacts from larval supply effects in a lobster fishery collapse (2009, background): “…their dynamics may be confounded by so-called ‘supply- side’ effects, whereby the supply of new recruits is derived to varying extents from planktonic larvae broadcast from neighboring populations (Eckman 1983, Lewin 1986, Roughgarden et al. 1988, Doherty & Fowler 1994, Cowen et al. 2000).”
Symbiodinium sp. associations in the gorgonian Pseudopterogorgia elisabethae in the Bahamas: high levels of genetic variability and population structure in symbiotic dinoflagellates (2003, background): “clade B genotypes appear to be retained within local populations, similar to model simulations (Cowen et al. 2000) and empirical data (Taylor and Hellberg 2003) from larval dispersing organisms in the Caribbean; however, dispersal by oceanic currents may also influence the population structure of Sy”
Dispersal modeling of fish early life stages: sensitivity with application to Atlantic cod in the western Gulf of Maine (2007, background): “Buoyancy is likely 271 Mar Ecol Prog Ser 347: 261–274, 2007 to increase the downstream advection of particles by strong surface currents, which can be counterbalanced by stronger dispersal in different directions influenced by wind.”
Toward a Dynamic Metacommunity Approach to Marine Reserve Theory (2004, background): “Many recent studies have contributed to the theory of marine communities (Connolly and Roughgarden 1999) and of population connectivity (Cowen et al. 2000, Lipcius et al. 2001).”
Random walk models for the movement and recruitment of reef fish larvae (2004, background): “…phase where settlement has been modelled as a passive dispersal process relying on entrapment (Dight et al. 1990a, 1990b, Dight & Black 1991, Cowen et al. 2000), where movement during the settlement stage has been considered but not modelled explicitly (James et al. 2002), or where…”
Variation in fish density, assemblage composition and relative rates of predation among mangrove, seagrass and coral reef habitats (2005, background): “For instance, during the pelagic larval phase the distribution and abundance of sexually mature individuals (Robertson et al. 1988), ocean circulation patterns (McIlwain 1997, Roberts 1997, Shapiro et al. 1997, Jones et al. 1999, Swearer et al. 1999, Cowen et al. 2000 ) and larval settling preferen”
Towards a panbiogeography of the seas (2005, background): “Cowen et al. (2000) also showed that larval retention occurs and that larval exchange rates in marine populations may be over-estimated.”
Larval transport pathways from Cuban snapper (Lutjanidae) spawning aggregations based on biophysical modeling (2005, background): “Utilizing a high-resolution ocean circulation model (see Cowen et al. 2000), we modeled larval trajectories for several species of snapper emanating from known spawning sites on the Cuban shelf.”
Direct evidence of a biophysical retention mechanism for coral reef fish larvae (2004, background): “This is conceivable, considering that the mean reproductive effort of S. partitus egg (demersal) in Barbados is 43.6 eggs m22 d21 (Cowen et al. 2000) on the west coast of the island (reef area of ca. 138 km2 as derived from satellite imagery Reef at Risk) and generates ca. 6 3 109 eggs d21.”
Behaviour as input for modelling dispersal of fish larvae: behaviour, biogeography, hydrodynamics, ontogeny, physiology and phylogeny meet hydrography (2007, background): “Given the strong influence that mortality rates can have on the scale of connectivity (Cowen et al. 2000), obtaining better estimates of mortality rates in the sea is a priority.”
Evolution of local recruitment and its consequences for marine populations (2002, background): “…our arguments are correct, then we might expect that many of the recruits to a local area result from local production, where larval capabilities and currents permit (Schultz and Cowen, 1994; Secor et al., 1995; Jones et al., 1999, Swearer et al., 1999; Cowen et al., 2000; Armsworth et al., 2001).”