Inverts and Energy: Aquatic Invertebrate Communities in the Snohomish Estuary

This talk is one of three graduate student presentations (~10-15 minutes each) to be delivered during this week's speaker series. 

Estuaries are important rearing areas for juvenile Pacific salmon on their migration from freshwater to saltwater. Like many other estuaries in the Pacific Northwest, the Snohomish River estuary in Everett, Washington was heavily developed for industrial and agricultural uses, significantly reducing habitat for outmigrating juvenile salmon and their invertebrate prey. Beginning in 1994, a series of earthen dike breach restoration projects occurred across the lower estuary aimed at reestablishing this lost habitat and connectivity within the estuarine system. To explore prey availability at restored sites across the estuary and better understand the tidally-driven availability of invertebrates to fish, we are sampling invertebrate assemblages across the Snohomish estuary during the spring salmon outmigration period. By leveraging the Snohomish estuary’s tight patchwork of restored emergent marsh sites, we hope to better understand which factors impact the distribution and abundance of invertebrate prey spatially across estuary habitats and temporally throughout the salmonid outmigration period. This research will inform whether restoring sites are providing functional rearing habitats for salmon.