Short- and Longer-term Effects of a Hurricane on Subtropical Estuarine Fishes

飓风等自然干扰对生态社区有重大影响。干扰会影响哪些物种和多少个体存在，以及这些物种在系统中发生的位置。了解自然干扰如何影响生态群落的一个主要障碍是，大多数研究缺乏干扰前的数据。干扰前数据是与干扰后数据进行比较以确定干扰影响的基础。因为干扰往往是不可预测的，所以当研究被干扰打断时，干扰研究就会随机发生(从而提供干扰前和干扰后的数据)。尽管飓风在温暖的纬度地区相对频繁，但它们在时间和空间上的发生是不可预测的。因此，对其影响的研究相对较少。与自然干扰相比，人为干扰往往具有不同的生态影响。这在一定程度上是因为人为影响往往是永久性的(例如，海堤取代了海滩)或长期的(为河口增加营养物质)，而许多自然干扰是离散的事件。关于人为干扰如何影响生态社区从自然干扰中恢复的能力，人们几乎一无所知。在2004年8月查利飓风直接袭击佛罗里达州夏洛特港的自然河口小溪和人为干扰的小溪中，对鱼类进行了19个月的采样。飓风后采样将为估计飓风对经济和生态上重要的河口鱼类的影响提供必要的数据。此外，这项研究将比较河口鱼类在人为干扰和自然小溪中从飓风中恢复的情况，对结果数据的分析将应用于教育、保护和资源管理。

Natural disturbances, such as hurricanes, have major influences on ecological communities. Disturbances influence which species, and how many individuals, are present, and where these species occur within the system. A major impediment to discerning how natural disturbances influence ecological communities is that most studies lack pre-disturbance data. Pre-disturbance data are essential as a basis for comparison with post-disturbance data to determine a disturbance's effect. Because disturbances tend to be unpredictable, studies of disturbances occur opportunistically when research is interrupted by a disturbance (thus providing pre- and post-disturbance data). Although hurricanes are relatively frequent in warm latitudes, their occurrence in time and space are unpredictable. Thus, studies of their effects are relatively rare.In contrast to natural disturbances, anthropogenic disturbances tend to have different ecological effects. This is, in part, because anthropogenic effects are often permanent (e.g., a seawall replaces a beach) or long-term (nutrients added to an estuary), while many natural disturbances are discrete events. Almost nothing is known about how anthropogenic disturbances impact the ability of ecological communities to recover from natural disturbances. Fishes in anthropogenically-disturbed and natural estuarine creeks of Charlotte Harbor, Florida were sampled for 19 months before a direct hit by Hurricane Charley in August 2004. Post-hurricane sampling will provide data necessary for estimates of hurricane impacts on economically and ecologically important estuarine fishes. In addition, this study will compare how estuarine fishes recover from a hurricane in anthropogenically-disturbed and in natural creeks, and the analysis of the resulting data will have applications to education, conservation, and resource management.