Dispersal of Marine Organisms and the Grand Challenges in Biology: An Introduction to the Symposium

Understanding dispersal and its complex variables is critical to understanding the ecology and evolution of life histories of species, but research on dispersal tends to reflect or emphasize particular disciplines, such as population genetics, functional morphology, evolutionary and developmental biology, physiology, and biophysics, or to emphasize a particular clade or functional group (e.g., fish, planktotrophs or lecithotrophs, pelagic or benthic organisms) in marine ecosystems. The symposium on "Dispersal of Marine Organisms" assembled an interdisciplinary group of outstanding young and established speakers to address dispersal in marine organisms in order to foster integration and cross-talk among different disciplines and to identify gaps in our knowledge and suggest areas for future research.