SGER Katrina: Responses of fish and crabs to nearshore habitat degradation in Lake Pontchartrain caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

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Intellectual Merit: On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall south of New Orleans as major category 4 hurricane. The 20 - 30 ft storm surge coupled with intense rain from the hurricane overwhelmed the city of New Orleans' flood control system of levees and large pumping stations. The result was large scale destruction of many areas within metropolitan New Orleans. A significant portion of this devastation was directly caused by the entrainment of flood water from Lake Pontchartrain in the metropolitan area for a prolonged period. On September 24, 2005 the flood control system was again overwhelmed in many portions of the metropolitan area by storm surge associated with landfall of Hurricane Rita, a category 3 hurricane, near Lake Charles, Louisiana and significant flooding reoccurred. In addition to the unprecedented socioeconomic devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which will make the storm the most deadly and economically costly in U.S. history, environmental damage associated with the storm and its aftermath poses another source of injury to the regions ecosystem. For the nearshore environment, the largest impact from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will be the discharge of contaminated and nutrient rich waters into Lake Pontchartrain. Because of the enormous public health risk that flood waters in Jefferson and Orleans Parish posed, the stagnant, contaminant and nutrient laden water was discharge directly into Lake Pontchartrain - the volume of which far exceeded normal discharge rates with no restrictions on contaminant and nutrient levels. While state and federal agencies are monitoring waters for contaminant and nutrient levels, few have the resources to focus on the biological impact to the estuarine ecosystem. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award allows the investigators to quantify the immediate impacts of discharge of flood waters from the City of New Orleans and adjacent Jefferson Parish on the nearshore benthic invertebrate and demersal fish community. The investigators will sample benthic invertebrate and demersal fish to document the spatial and temporal extent of habitat degradation in the nearshore areas of southern Lake Pontchartrain. To assess the functional responses of selected mobile consumers (fish and crabs), the investigators will apply a novel acoustic telemetry approach to document habitat utilization. Pre-Katrina/Rita data collected by Powers in the early 1990's in a study of the impact of outfall canals on nearshore benthic communities of southern Lake Pontchatrain will be used for comparison with the sampling activities.Broader Impact: The proposed study couples traditional benthic ecology with innovative new technology to resolve questions of critical importance to marine ecology and conservation in the wake of one the largest natural disasters to strike the nearshore ecosystem of the coastal US. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in the field work and post-field work processing activities, thus allowing the use of this major disturbance event as an educational opportunity for marine scientists who will be called upon to respond to future disasters.