Demographics of high marsh consumers from Breder trap transect collections in tidal creeks associated with long term fertilization experiments, Rowley, MA

At PIE, mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) use the spring-cycle high tides to access the flooded high marsh platform and eat invertebrate prey, coupling the high marsh and aquatic creek food webs by gathering energy produced on the high marsh and making it available to the aquatic food web. Changes in the geomorphology of saltmarsh creek edges greatly influence the survival, biomass, and resource use of mummichog populations. Here, we capture animals using Breder traps to quantify the communities accessing the high marsh at night during one of these high tides in July 2018 across 3 PIE creeks known to present different geomorphologic patterns in their low marsh zones. These data can be used for the assessment of the impact of low marsh geomorphology on consumer communities in PIE marshes. Mummichog captured in these Breder traps were further analyzed for gut content (LTE-TIDE-BrederTrap-GutContents). These data were included in part of the study “Habitat decoupling via saltmarsh creek geomorphology alters connection between spatially-coupled food webs” (Lesser et al. 2020) and were a portion of an MBL REU project.