Introduction to Fish First and Secondary Metamorphoses - Metamorphosis in Fish - page 1

CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Fish First and
Secondary Metamorphoses
Karine Rousseau 1,a, * and Sylvie Dufour 1,b
1.1 Metamorphosis
The term metamorphosis is commonly used in metazoa to define
remarkable developmental body changes accompanied by a drastic shift
in habitat or behavior. Such events have been described in various groups
such as cnidaria, insects, crustacean, molluscs, tunicates and vertebrates
(amphibians and some fi shes).
Back to basics, metamorphosis comes from the Greek meta - « change »
and morphe « form », indicating that remarkable morphological change
should be one major criteria to define metamorphosis. The problem
thereafter is how to defi ne a morphological change; does it need to be drastic
so that the premetamorphic and the postmetamorphic individuals do not
look alike or could it be any anatomical remodelling? Moreover, in animal
as in vegetal kingdom, the need to change form comes from a change of
modes of life or of habitats.
In 2006, a symposium, entitled “Metamorphosis: A multi-kingdom
approach” was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative
and Comparative Biology (SICB). Afterwards, several participants from
different backgrounds presented each of their conceptions of metamorphosis
in one review paper (Bishop et al., 2006). As they suggested, this review
could be presented as a reference tool, as it shows so well how diffi cult
the task is. Different criteria for metamorphosis were defi ned: « habitat
1 Research Unit BOREA “Biology of Aquatic Organisms and Ecosystems” Muséum National
d'Histoire Naturelle, CNRS 7208, IRD 207, UPMC, 7 rue Cuvier, CP32, 75231 Paris Cedex 05,
France.
a E-mail: [e-mail]
b E-mail: [e-mail]
*Corresponding author