California Sea Grant College Program

We seek to test hypotheses about rates of self seeding, the role of passive circulation and behavior in larval transport, and to identify regional source and sink populations in mytilid mussels. We assessed temporal variability in connectivity patterns for Mytilus spp, using experiments conducted previously (in 03, 04, 05, 06, and 07) and during this grant (08–10), compared results to passive transport predictions corrected for larval supply, and synthesize the information to generate generalized conceptual models of open coast, inner and outer bay connectivity patterns in Southern California.