UC Berkeley's Freshwater Research Group
Members of the Freshwater Lab had a great time at the Salmonid Restoration Federation conference in Santa Cruz in early May! Gabe organized an incredible session on Foodscapes and members of the lab gave presentations in multiple sessions. Great exchange of ideas about salmon life history diversity, non-natal rearing, food webs, fire and flow!
Sooyeon Yi, postdoc in the Freshwater Lab, presented her work titled “Defining Environmental Flow Needs for California’s Central Valley Rivers” at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in Session HS3.5. Her presentation focused on designing rulesets for calculating functional flow targets and shared preliminary results showing how well these targets were met across different river basins and water year types. The talk received strong interest and thoughtful feedback, particularly around the broader applicability of the approach to other basins.
Several current and former members of the Carlson Lab group recently published a paper, Anatomy of a range contraction: Flow–phenology mismatches threaten salmonid fishes near their trailing edge, that shows the effects of an extreme hydroclimatic event on salmon and steelhead populations in streams along the North Coast of California. Extremely late rains and low flows during the winter of 2013/14 blocked access to critical breeding and rearing habitats for Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and steelhead trout. This “flow-phenology mismatch” delayed the timing and reduced the range of spawning for all three species and in some cases resulted in cohort failure. The study demonstrates how the timing of particular storms can play an outsized role in determining which migratory fish species are able to access their upriver breeding grounds and persist. It also highlights the value of long-term monitoring programs and partnerships that allow us to identify the broader impacts of these types of events. You can read more about this work in these news stories: UC Berkeley news story, SF Gate article, Courthouse news article.
Congratulations to Freshwater Lab postdoc Hank Baker on a new paper in Ecology Letters, Variation in salmon migration phenology bolsters population stability but is threatened by drought! The research team used over a decade of movement data to characterize variation in the rearing strategies of juvenile coho salmon, which are endangered on the central California coast. They found that some fish leave their natal habitat early to rear in the lower portion of the creek, while others stay in their natal habitat until they are ready to migrate to sea. This seemingly subtle variation in behavior dramatically improves population stability and may be an important feature in their recovery. However, variation is reduced or absent in low flow years, suggesting that the negative effects of drought on salmon may be compounded by loss of critical phenotypic variation. This work was funded by the NOAA Restoration Center as part of ongoing salmon recovery efforts in Willow Creek, a tributary to the Russian River in Sonoma County, CA. For more information on this work, see our news story.
The Berkeley Freshwater Group had an amazing time getting to know and meet potential new students as well as show what the lab has to offer! It was a wonderful opportunity to meet, socialize, and get to know who will be joining the Berkeley Freshwater Group next school year!
Royale Williams gave a talk at the California Academy of Sciences about the history and importance of cultural burns. These burns not only promote cultural revival, but also ecological health, as they invigorate the overall health of forests, from vegetation to animals. She was joined by Maddy Rifka whose image, Good Fire, was the first-place winner of the 2024 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition.
You can watch Royale’s talk here!
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!
