Be Sure to Check With the Animals

I spent most of this week performing calculations, gathering additional data, and smoothing out some unreasonable outcomes from these data and calculations. This week really was all about checking with the animals, which has become an important part of my work on the Mississippi Delta projects. In the model that we are building/working on, we have six groups of mostly freshwater fish species, though these species can tolerate brackish waters. Two of these groups you probably know and love if you enjoy fishing - juvenile and adult largemouth bass. Now while the bass and the other four model groups can tolerate saline waters, they are freshwater fish species, which means that their tolerance to estuarine water is rather low. However, these species may end up in monitoring data where you don't expect them - perhaps due to freshwater dry ups in more inland waterways. 

I mention this scenario because I needed to recalculate the salinity tolerance curves for our freshwater species, as I originally didn't consider the animal when I received my calculation outputs. Since these tolerance curves are meant to describe the tolerance range AND the optimal environmental conditions for our model groups, sometimes the calculations cannot be applied holistically across the model groups. Here we know that the freshwater species can tolerate saltwater but they will more likely inhabit the freshwater parts of our model domain, so we needed to reevaluate the salinity tolerance curves so that our largemouth bass and other freshwater friends aren't swimming out to the open ocean - where salinities are regularly > 32 psu - once we incorporate spatial components into our modeling. When we do incorporate the spatial components, some of these freshwater individuals will end up starting out in the open ocean, but the salinity values will fall outside of their salinity tolerances, so these individuals will die, leaving individuals only in areas where they can tolerate the environmental conditions; a pretty neat aspect of this modeling program.

That's all for this week, a short but sweet blog. Stay tuned for next week, where I will spend time talking about some aspects of the oyster work I've completed.