Advances in Marine Biology

Volume 28 of this review series contains articles on fish population recruitment, mollusc ecology and brachiopod biology. Heath reviews the progress of field research into the early life history stages of marine fin fish. For the past 100 years or so research has focused on the sampling of eggs and larvae to assess the biomass of spawning adults. The factors affecting the survival of eggs and fish larvae have also been much studied in relation to subsequent recruitment to the fishery. However, field evidence is still scarce for any of the current models of recruitment and much more remains to be done. James and his colleagues set out to present a thorough account of brachiopod biology. Some 550 million years old, this new minor phylum was formerly both numerous and diverse. Its fossil record is well preserved and some taxa have persisted, virtually unchanged, from the Early Cambrian to the present day. The living forms, though less numerically significant than their ancestors, still inhabit most marine habitats and may be found in all the world's seas and oceans.
Research on both fossil and extant forms provides exciting opportunities to understand better the evolution of marine environments over a substantial period of time. Trueman and Brown compare and contrast the burrowing habit in the various gastropod families that have adopted this mode of life. While the families concerned are sufficiently distinct to suggest that burrowing has evolved independently in each, as well as strategies quite distinct from other burrowing molluscs, such as bivalves.