The early life history of fish—there is still a lot of work to do!

Abstract

Abstract The themed set of articles that follows this introduction contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the 36th Annual Larval Fish Conference (ALFC), convened in Osøyro, Norway, 2–6 July 2012. The conference was organized around four theme sessions, three of which are represented with articles in this collection: “Assessing the relative contribution of different sources of mortality in the early life stages of fishes”; “The contribution of mechanistic,behavioural, and physiological studies on fish larvae to ecosystem models”; “Effects of oil and natural gas surveys, extraction activity and spills on fish early life stages”. Looking back at the main themes of earlier conferences about the early life history of fish reveals that they were not very different from those of ALFC2012. Clearly, we still have a lot of work to do on these and other topics related to the biology and ecology of fish early life stages.