Role of buoyancy in shaping species-specific spatial niches during early stages of fish

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The spatial distribution of marine fish eggs and larvae reflects how biological traits interact with oceanography. Despite developing in a highly dispersive environment, early life stages often display persistent and species-specific spatial patterns, observations that are difficult to explain by behavioural processes alone. This essay explores the idea that buoyancy in this context acts as a key physical process linking eggs and larvae to conservative water-mass properties as salinity and temperature. Species- and population-specific buoyancy characteristics may restrict early life stages to limited three-dimensional habitats, help maintain species-specific spatial associations with hydrographic structures, and bias drift routes towards recurrent nursery areas. The proposed key role of salinity has implications for how climate-driven changes would propagate through early stages and affect recruitment to fish stocks.