Throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century there was intense scientific curiosity about the communities of animals and plants that were revealed by the rise and fall of tides along Atlantic coastlines. In Britain, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Philip Gosse were leading Victorian naturalists inspired to study that fauna and flora. Later in the nineteenth century, not content to merely observe, describe and classify living organisms in coastal seas, naturalists also saw the need to try to understand how they functioned and behaved. To achieve such objectives it was soon apparent that they would require facilities in which to maintain marine animals and plants under near-natural conditions in seawater aquarium systems. Cogent advocacy of their requirements, at a time of burgeoning public interest in marine life, then led to the establishment of specialist laboratories throughout the world in which detailed observations and experiments could be undertaken on a wide range of marine animals and plants (Ryland, 2000).

One such laboratory established by French biologists in 1872 was at Roscoff, in western France. There, on the beaches of Brittany, French and visiting biologists first recorded a striking rhythmic phenomenon, subsequent study of which proved to be seminal in the development of our understanding of biological clocks in marine animals and plants.