Author: Rose Mohammadi

Former Ruhi lab undergraduate Amin al-Jamal has published a new paper in Ecology: Aquatic top predator prefers terrestrial prey in an intermittent stream! Meet the belostomatid giant water bug Abedus indentatus, the dominant predator in fishless sections of Chalone Creek, Pinnacles National Park, California. Despite living in the water, the study found that water bugs seem to prefer prey from the terrestrial environment. Isolated pools in drying rivers have incredibly high perimeter to area (P/A) ratios, and aquatic predators such as giant water bugs enjoy the increased influx of terrestrial prey! On top of that, prey that fall into the water are less equipped to deal with an aquatic predator. The double whammy of high P/A ratios and increased prey susceptibility in intermittent streams might facilitate this cool feeding preference!

Congratulations to Ruhi Lab manager Kendall Archie on his new position as a Masters student at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Kendall will be advised by Alison O’Dowd and is joining a project that seeks to understand the food web responses associated with the Trinity River. Kendall is bringing his benthic macroinvertebrate expertise up north and will examine salmonid food resources and diet. Thank you for being a fantastic lab manager and we wish you the best in your graduate studies!

Congratulations to postdoc Robert Fournier on the publication of the paper “Long‐term data reveal widespread phenological change across major US estuarine food webs“. Using long-term biomonitoring data, we examined climate-driven phenological shifts within and across food webs in the San Francisco, Chesapeake, and Massachusetts Bay estuaries.

Are food webs at risk of tropic mismatch & disassembly? Read more to find out!

Berkeley Freshwater went on an amazing trip to Lagunitas Creek to watch coho spawn on the central California coast. We watched coho leap over waterfalls, spar with each other, build their redds, and spawn. Best of luck as they continue their journeys upstream!

Members of Berkeley Freshwater recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, DC! Ted Grantham, Wietske Medema, and Sooyeon Yi represented their COEQWAL (COllaboratory for EQuity in Water Allocations) project. Ted presented an overview of the collaboratory and its goals, Sooyeon shared her work modeling functional environmental flows in California’s Central Valley, and Rose talked about riparian tree-groundwater interactions at Pinnacles.

Congratulations to new Dr. Kyle Leathers on delivering his finishing talk! Kyle gave an overview of his impressive dissertation research and successfully completed the ceremonial crossing over Strawberry Creek (in waders). We are lucky that Kyle will be staying on with the Ruhi Lab a couple of months before beginning a postdoc at USGS exploring water quality and algae in the San Francisco Bay-Delta!

Members of Berkeley Freshwater recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society in Honolulu! Ted organized a session on ecosystem-based approaches to environmental flow management and Mariska presented a study on the environmental factors that influence emigration timing of coho salmon. We were also thrilled to connect with incoming faculty member Rachel Carlson and to reunite with Berkeley Freshwater alums Brian Kastl, Emily Chen, and Kasey Pregler!

Congratulations to Tim Jäger on his magnificent Master’s defense! His thesis examined life-history plasticity of stream insects to future climates in the Sierra Nevada. Earlier snowmelt and return to low-flow conditions will likely lead to earlier peaks and smaller size at emergence. It was not a (chirono)mini undertaking as Tim processed thousands of individuals! We can’t wait to see what this newly emerged MSc flies off to do next!

A new Nature Sustainability study by Lucy Andrews and Ted Grantham found that only 8% of all rivers and streams in California are monitored by stream gauges that measure flow. Lead author Lucy told the LA Times, “More monitoring of these critical streams is needed to protect these vulnerable species. If we maintain the status quo, and if we don’t know how much water is in rivers and streams, we are essentially dooming some of our freshwater species.” The papers also outlined a method to improve stream monitoring and modeled a reconfigured gauging network across the state.