Habitat loss and fish assemblages in surfgrass beds (funded by the San Diego Foundation Blasker-Rose-Miah Environmental Grant; Edna Bailey Sussman Foundation; Anchor Environmental Scholarship; Mabel Myers Memorial Scholarship; SDSU Master's Program in Ecology)

Carey Galst's thesis project --

Carey Galst explored the relationships between fishes and surfgrass beds (Phyllospadix torreyi) and the role of disturbance in influencing these patterns. Surfgrass occurs in very shallow high-energy waters along the open coast and may be affected by both natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Such disturbances can manifest themselves by complete removal of local beds or creating habitat patches. Carey’s objectives were to (1) explore fish-habitat relationships for recruits and older life stages of fishes, and (2) determine the effects of experimental manipulations to remove habitat in simulating disturbance and the loss of surfgrass habitat. Carey characterized surfgrass beds and the relationships between different habitat attributes and fishes, finding that bed area was important for species richness, while vertical relief and other attributes were most important in explaining variation in density. Habitat loss affected recruitment success but not the abundance of older juvenile and adult fishes. To our knowledge, this is the first study to describe fish-habitat relationships and examine the role of disturbance in influencing these patterns in subtidal surfgrass beds.

This page was last modified on December 28, 2007.

SDSU Fish Ecology Lab

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