From the ocean to a reef habitat: how do the larvae of coral reef fishes find their way home

As it is unlikely that successful settlement is solely a matter of chance (i.e. tofind a suitable habitat), one of the greatest challenges facing the fish larvae is how to locate therelatively rare patches of coral reef habitat on which they settle and ultimately reside as adults.The answer must lie partly in the sensory modalities of fishes at settlement. Habitat selection isonly possible if fish larvae could detect some environmental cues to select a suitable reef habitatat settlement. The present review aims at providing the latest works dealing with informationperception in coral reef fish larvae at settlement. Two decades ago, it was generally assumedthat larval behaviors and sensory abilities at settlement were considered too feeble to significantlyaffect dispersal outcomes. Several recent studies showed that recognition of suitable reefhabitats by fish larvae at settlement is based on a combination of visual, chemical and acousticcues. The first part of our review shows the main advances in the knowledge of visual, chemicaland acoustic cues used by fish larvae to detect an island, a reef, a micro-habitat, a conspecific orsome predators. The second part of our review deals with the effect of imprinting and/or innatecapabilities. The third part focuses on the different cues used at different scales and underlinessome contradictory results about the distance of transmission and detection of chemical andacoustic cues in coral reefs. Finally, as global and regional environmental changes have stressedcoral reefs to such an extent that they are either destroyed or in decline, the fourth part presentsthe effects of both anthropogenic and environmental stressors on information perception andresponse capacities in coral reef fish larvae. If polluted seawater disrupts the larval abilities tofind a suitable reef habitat, fish larvae may spend more time in the planktonic environment,resulting in increased energetic costs and predation risk, and consequently a lower larval settlement.We hypothesise that as the stability of fish communities is dependent, in part, on the stabilityof social interactions, the disruption of “larvae-habitat relationships” can have major consequencesfor larval settlement into adult population with further repercussions for the ecosystemas a whole. Overall, larval settlement of coral reef fish is an excellent example of the complexityof interactions between an organism and its environment as without perceiving environmentalcues, fish lar