The poor dispersal ability of F. ceranoides certainly plays a role; fucoid algae lack planktonic dispersive stages and therefore F. ceranoides individuals typically complete their entire life-cycle within the discrete, isolated patches of the estuarine habitat they inhabit.
However, most population genetic studies of shallow coastal biota focus on organisms with planktonic dispersive stages, and/or have very poor sampling resolution in the studied region.
Examples include a variety of species lacking planktonic dispersive stages and/or exhibiting particularly strict ecological requirements, such as intertidal fucalean and kelp seaweeds [ 1- 5], seagrasses [ 6, 7], direct-developing invertebrates and fish [ 8- 11], high-intertidal rock-pool invertebrates [ 12], and many estuarine organisms [ 13- 18].
Interestingly, Bathymodiolus mussels still possess a dispersive larval stage, a biological feature that has long questioned the possibility of geographic isolation in marine species [15].
Water flow is the most important habitat characteristic determining the composition of the assemblages of aquatic Coleoptera, and species tend to be restricted to either standing water bodies or to running water, both in the larval and in the more dispersive adult stage (see [ 22, 24] and references therein).
A number of benthic species are known to maintain wide geographic distributions in the deep-sea [ 31, 32], although most of these taxa produce dispersive propagule stages or pelagic larvae that facilitate gene flow over these large distances.
It consists of the two stages, dispersive and achromatising.
In corals, the dispersive larval phase is particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental stress.
We design an all-optical tunable delay line based on both dispersive and wavelength conversion stages involving modulational instability of a two-frequency pump field propagating in a highly birefringent fiber.
On the other hand, it is difficult to envision how such fine-scale population structure can be maintained in species with dispersive, planktonic life history stages inhabiting an open environment with few barriers to gene flow, such as that exemplified by most marine ecosystems [1] [3].
