Mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) gut content analysis from Breder trap transect collections in tidal creeks associated with long term fertilization experiments, Rowley, MA.

At PIE, mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) use the spring-cycle high tides to access the flooded high marsh platform and eat invertebrate prey, coupling the high marsh and aquatic creek food webs by gathering energy produced on the high marsh and making it available to the aquatic food web. Changes in the geomorphology of saltmarsh creek edges greatly influence the survival, biomass, and resource use of mummichog populations. Here we use gut content analysis assess the diet of mummichog on the high marsh platform during a flooding spring-cycle tide in July 2018 across 3 PIE creeks known to present different geomorphologic patterns in their low marsh zones. These data allow us to quantify the amount of terrestrial invertebrate prey mummichog consume on a single flooding tide and determine the impact altered low marsh geomorphology has on the trophic relationships in PIE food webs. These mummichog were captured in Breder traps; information about the consumer communities captured in these traps was recorded separately (LTE-TIDE-BrederTrap-Demographics). These data were included in part of the study “Habitat decoupling via saltmarsh creek geomorphology alters connection between spatially-coupled food webs” (Lesser et al. 2020) and were a portion of an MBL REU project.