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On the occasion of the 10th Indo-Pacific Fish Conference (http://ipfc10.criobe.pf/) to be held in Tahiti in October 2017, it seemed timely to update Randall’s 1985 list of the fishes known from French Polynesia. Many studies focusing on fishes in this area have been published since 1985, but Randall’s list remains the authoritative source. Herein we present an expanded species list of 1,301 fishes now known to occur in French Polynesia and we review the expeditions and information sources responsible for the over 60% increase in the number of known species since the publication of Randall’s checklist in 1985. Our list of the fishes known from French Polynesia includes only those species with a reliably verifiable presence in these waters. In cases where there was any doubt about the identity of a species, or of the reliability of a reported sighting, the species was not included in our list. 

The extent of increasing anthropogenic impacts on large marine vertebrates partly depends on the animals’ movement patterns. Effective conservation requires identification of the key drivers of movement including intrinsic properties and extrinsic constraints associated with the dynamic nature of the environments the animals inhabit. However, the relative importance of intrinsic versus extrinsic factors remains elusive. We analyze a global dataset of ∼2.8 million locations from >2,600 tracked individuals across 50 marine vertebrates evolutionarily separated by millions of years and using different locomotion modes (fly, swim, walk/paddle). Strikingly, movement patterns show a remarkable convergence, being strongly conserved across species and independent of body length and mass, despite these traits ranging over 10 orders of magnitude among the species studied. This represents a fundamental difference between marine and terrestrial vertebrates not previously identified, likely linked to the reduced costs of locomotion in water. Movement patterns were primarily explained by the interaction between species-specific traits and the habitat(s) they move through, resulting in complex movement patterns when moving close to coasts compared with more predictable patterns when moving in open oceans. This distinct difference may be associated with greater complexity within coastal microhabitats, highlighting a critical role of preferred habitat in shaping marine vertebrate global movements. Efforts to develop understanding of the characteristics of vertebrate movement should consider the habitat(s) through which they move to identify how movement patterns will alter with forecasted severe ocean changes, such as reduced Arctic sea ice cover, sea level rise, and declining oxygen content.