Dear Colleagues,

Marine invertebrates have diverse life histories, including a wide range of larval development trajectories and strategies. Larval stages usually disperse and colonize. However, specific settlement and metamorphosis patterns are crucial to successful recruitment and to ensure favourable conditions for adult existence. From an ecologist perspective, these critical developmental steps represent complex physiological processes that respond to environmental cues and in turn modify the larva's surroundings. For example, the use of chemicals to stimulate metamorphosis may enhance larval production in hatcheries, while early settlement by key encrusting species may result in significant ship hull biofouling. From an academic perspective, recent studies on population connectivity have highlighted the need to understand larval development under various environmental conditions to answer biogeographic, evolution and conservation ecology questions. While traditional methods, such as microscopy, histology, toxicology and molecular biology have facilitated understanding of key larval roles and sensitivities, the advent of biotechnological approaches, such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, are rapidly expanding our knowledge of complex and essential larval processes.

This special issue is intended to highlight the current state of the art and future directions in larval development with a special emphasis on research targeting settlement and metamorphosis. We would like to specially invite contributions in both academic and applied areas, such as aquaculture biotechnology, biofouling, larval functioning (e.g., physiology, toxicology, immunology, genetics), population connectivity, evolution and conservation.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• marine larval ecology
• larval metamorphosis
• dispersal and settlement
• bioadhesion
• marine biofouling/antifouling