Larval ecology of marine invertebrates: a sesquicentennial history

Although larval ecology has roots as far back as Aristotle, the earliest accurate ideas about larval recruitment, dispersal, and behavior arose about 150 years ago, during the time of J. Vaughn Thompson and Edward Forbes. In this review, the history of larval ecology is traced from the initial discovery of larvae and the early formulation of ideas in the nineteenth century through the development of methodology for addressing hard-to-study field processes in the 1980's. A survey of the literature in major marine biology journals reveals the overall trends in larval research and the temporal changes in the proportion of effort devoted to various kinds of studies. Many recent studies of larval processes resemble seldom-cited studies that were done more than a half century earlier.