Untangling the estuary’s food web with data analysis and synthesis
Blog by Rosemary Hartman. Paper and analysis by Tanya L Rogers, Samuel M Bashevkin , Christina E Burdi, Denise D Colombano, Peter N Dudley, Brian Mahardja, Lara Mitchell, Sarah Perry, and Parsa Saffarinia.
Did you know that one female threadfin shad can lay 5,000 to 20,000 eggs at once?! The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl, which surveys the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and upper San Francisco Estuary, caught 1,551 threadfin shad in 2022. If half of those were female, they could have produced three to fifteen MILLION baby fish. But in 2023 the Fall Midwater Trawl only caught 1,922 threadfin shad. What happened to all the baby fish?
Apart from the number of parents, fish populations (and other populations) are usually controlled by a combination of three ecological processes: 1) Individuals cannot find enough food or nutrients to survive and reproduce (what’s known as a ‘bottom-up’ process), 2) they are eaten by predators (what’s known as a ‘top-down’ process), or 3) they encounter unfavorable environmental conditions such as high water temperatures that lower survival. It is frequently very hard to tell which process is dominating, but understanding whether lack of food or too many predators is controlling a population can be very helpful in figuring out how to recover populations (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Fish populations depend on the number of fish you start with (parents), amount of food available, number of predators, and suitable environmental conditions such as temperature and salinity. Diagram by Rosemary Hartman, DWR.
To try and figure out which processes might be controlling threadfin shad (and other estuarine fishes), a team of scientists recently applied structural equation models to a long-term dataset of physical variables, phytoplankton, zooplankton, clams, and fishes. The resulting paper “Evaluating top-down, bottom-up, and environmental drivers of pelagic food web dynamics along an estuarine gradient” was recently published in the journal Ecology. It is a great example of how long-term monitoring data, data integration, cutting-edge statistics, and diverse teams can work together to provide new insights about our environment.
The team started by drawing out their hypothesized relationships between ecosystem components in a food-web diagram (Figure 2). They wanted to create a mathematical model that described the relationships between each component in their diagram, but could only do so if there were adequate data available. They compiled data from six different long-term monitoring programs and one model dataset for a combined package of forty years of data across the estuary. Unfortunately, some of the key variables in their conceptual model, such as specific types of phytoplankton, aquatic vegetation, and large, predatory fishes, haven’t been monitored as well as others, so couldn’t be used in the model, but what was available was impressive.
Figure 2. Conceptual model of the estuarine food web used as a basis for the NCEAS synthesis team's food web model. Diagram adapted by Rosemary Hartman, DWR, from Rogers et al, 2024.
They applied a modeling technique that allowed them to quantify each of the connections in their food web diagram to determine whether changes in one population were due to top-down effects of their predators, bottom-up effects of their food supply, or environmental variables like temperature and flow, and this was not an easy task! As Tanya Rogers, one of the team members and co-lead author on the final paper said, “It was sometimes hard to find the right balance between detail and interpretability”. Really complicated models have lots of detail, but can be hard to understand, but if the model is too simple it doesn’t describe reality. They eventually settled on a model that was somewhere in between. They found that fish and zooplankton trends were more driven by food supply in freshwater areas of the estuary, but the same populations were more driven by predation in the brackish water areas of the estuary. Abiotic drivers (temperature, turbidity, and flow) were frequently important in all regions and at all levels of the food web and had similar or greater effects than food supply or predation.
This was a great example of using an integrated dataset to address big questions about the ecology of the estuary, but the coolest part of it may have been the team that put it together. This project was part of a synthesis program sponsored by the Delta Science Program and led by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). The Delta Science Program recruited a diverse team of researchers from State and federal resource agencies and local universities with complementary areas of expertise. The team then participated in training workshops run by NCEAS on open science practices, data synthesis, reproducible workflows, data publications, and statistical techniques. Once the team had these new skills, the NCEAS trainers helped them assemble the integrated datasets and analyses used for the project. This workshop resulted in a really cool paper, but more importantly the team gained the skills to do more research like this in the future. Plus, they had fun getting to work with other early career researchers from different organizations who bring different perspectives.
Most exciting of all, the team made several recommendations for future research, such as exploring nutrient dynamics in more detail, testing changes to the dynamics in different salinity zones, exploring different time scales, and filling monitoring gaps such as large predatory fishes. With the team’s new skills and the available data, there are a lot more possibilities to explore.
Further reading
- Tanya L Rogers, Samuel M Bashevkin, Christina E Burdi, Denise D Colombano, Peter N Dudley, Brian Mahardja, Lara Mitchell, Sarah Perry, Parsa Saffarinia. 2024. Evaluating top-down, bottom-up, and environmental drivers of pelagic food web dynamics along an estuarine gradient. Ecology. e4274.
- Brown, L. R., W. Kimmerer, J. L. Conrad, S. Lesmeister, and A. Mueller–Solger. 2016. Food webs of the Delta, Suisun Bay, and Suisun Marsh: an update on current understanding and possibilities for management. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. 14 (3).
- Durand, J. R. 2015. A conceptual model of the aquatic food web of the upper San Francisco Estuary. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science.13 (3).