Juvenile fish assemblage recruitment dynamics in a mid-Atlantic estuary: before and after Hurricane Sandy

Hurricanes can have long-term effects on estuarine fauna. Understanding these effects is important as climate change may influence the severity and frequency of these storms. On 29 October 2012, Hurricane Sandy, a large storm spanning roughly 1850 km in diameter, made landfall in Brigantine, New Jersey (USA), approximately 20 km south of Barnegat Bay, during an ongoing study of the bay’s ichthyofauna, providing an opportunity to observe fish recruitment dyna mics coincident with hurricane passage. The objective of this study was to measure variance in the Barnegat Bay pre-Sandy fish assemblage relative to that of 1 and 2 yr after the storm. Barnegat Bay fishes were surveyed with an extensive otter trawl study in April, June, August, and October of 2012 (pre-Sandy), 2013 (1 yr post-Sandy), and 2014 (2 yr post-Sandy). Species composition of the fish assemblage was similar across years. Analyzed structural characteristics (abundance, diversity, richness) of the fish assemblage were occasionally more likely to occur or were larger pre-Sandy and 2 yr post-Sandy relative to 1 yr post-Sandy, but this trend was inconsistent across seasons and between structural characteristics. Furthermore, odds of occurrence and length frequency distributions for many resident species and sentinel fall/winter spawners did not indicate that variance could be definitively explained as a hurricane effect. The capability of fish to relocate from areas of temporarily unsuitable habitat and annual new recruitment of larvae and juveniles to the bay likely contributed to the observed stability in the fish assemblage.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Marine Ecology Progress Series

• Publication date

  2020-05-07

• Fields of study

  Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3354/meps13309
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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