ABSTRACT
The term ‘amphidromy’ was fi rst proposed by Myers (1949) to describe diadromous life histories where migrations between fresh and sea water are not directly associated with reproduction. Even though the term was fi rst proposed in 1949, it took several decades for it to be widely accepted, with only very limited, if any, use of the term prior to 1970 (McDowall 1992). The term ‘amphidromous’ only begins to appear with any regularity in the titles and abstracts of published papers in the 1970s (Web of Knowledge; search conducted on 22 August 2012) as Japanese ichthyologists began employing the term to describe the life histories of various, mostly gobioid fi shes, of the Japanese archipelago. Clearly, based on the number of publications (see Goto 1990; Iguchi and Mizuno 1990), the term was familiar to many Japanese researchers by 1990, however much of this literature was published in Japanese and hence relatively inaccessible to English speaking researchers.
