Although the focus is on Wales, this packs draws on examples from all over the world and covers everyday issues such as how food supply, settlement, transport and health may be affected.
Specifically, we compare the magnitudes of larval supply, settlement, and recruitment at hydrothermal vents, seeps, and whale, wood and kelp falls.
The roles of larval supply, settlement, and recruitment in maintaining linkages among different chemosynthetic habitats have not been sufficiently investigated to arrive at any definite conclusions to date.
Future sampling and experimentation at multiple chemosynthetic habitat types will, without a doubt, shed more light onto the roles of larval supply, settlement and recruitment in controlling the patterns of diversity on a global scale.
We obtained all available measures of rates of larval supply, settlement and recruitment, from the published scientific literature, as well as from some recent, unpublished studies, that fit our criteria as described below for each process (Table S1).
We hypothesized that if the assemblages face similar constraints in the different habitats, the rates of larval supply, settlement, and recruitment, as well as the taxonomic diversity of the recruit assemblages, should be similar across habitats.
