Geoff Moser was a remarkably productive and versatile larval-fish biologist who spent his working life at the NOAA, NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center, La Jolla, California, retiring in 2002.  He passed away on 30 September 2021.  A collection of publications is planned on subjects of interest to Geoff and/or by authors influenced by Geoff and his work. 

This could include, but is not limited to: larval development of marine fish species, the use of larval development in phylogenetics, systematics of mesopelagic fishes, distribution of larval fishes and larval-fish communities, fish larvae and the California Current system, use of the CalCOFI database to examine long-term trends in marine ecology and fisheries, larval-fish biology and behavior.

At present, an ad hoc committee of Jeff Leis, Bill Watson and Bruce Mundy is in the early stages of organizing this collection, but we would welcome the involvement of others.  We are talking to staff of the NOAA Scientific Publications Office about the possibility of placing this collection in Fishery Bulletin, and they have also mentioned the possibility of including it in their Professional Papers series.  Both are open access, and have no publication charges.  However, other possibilities will be explored, if needed.  Regardless, submitted manuscripts would need to go through the normal review process of whatever publication series accepts the collection.

Right now, we need an indication of how many authors are interested in submitting a manuscript.  If you are interested, please send a no-obligation expression of interest and tentative title to [email protected]. It would be very helpful if you could answer the questions below.  Your answers will help guide the ad hoc committee’s directions:

1) Authors(s):

2) Institution:

3) Tentative title:

4) If Fishery Bulletin does not prove to be feasible, would you be prepared to submit your manuscript to Professional Papers?

5) When would you expect to have a manuscript ready for submission?  a) 6-months from now; b) 9 months from now; c) 12 months from now; d) other (please specify)

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact Jeff Leis.  Please circulate this call for expressions of interest to others who may be interested.

For perspective, three recent collections of larval fish papers have appeared in Frontiers of Marine Science (Paris & Wolanski, eds, 2018, 10 papers on behavior and recruitment), Marine Ecology Progress Series (Catalán et al 2020, 19 papers from the 2019 Larval Fish Conference), and Oceans (Morais and Faria, 2020-21, 7 papers on fish larval biology and ecology).  Two things that stand about these collections differ from what we expect the Moser Memorial collection will be: the majority of papers in these collections are from European researchers on NE Atlantic species and subjects, and there were no systematics papers.