The Changing Bay of Fundy—Beyond 400 Years THE ROLES OF Corophium volutator AND MERCURY IN COMPROMISING SHOREBIRD MIGRATION

• Main Authors: Andrew S. Didyk, Nicole A. Bourgeois, Paul A. Arp, Jesse Bourque, Birgit Braune, Georgina K. Cox, Charles Ritchie, Peter G. Wells, Michael D. B. Burt
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Morrison; Atlantic salmon; Salmo salar
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.551.9391; http://docs.informatics.management.dal.ca/gsdl/collect/bofep1/pdf/WF/BOFEP6-2004-062.pdf

Each summer, the Bay of Fundy serves as a staging area for many species of shorebirds which, in two weeks or less, must acquire sufficient fat stores to power a non-stop flight of more than 4,000 km to their wintering grounds in South America (McNeil and Cadieux 1972; Hicklin 1987). During their stay, the birds risk varying degrees of exposure to parasites and heavy metals such as mercury. For example, female Semipalmated Sandpipers, Calidris pusilla, are the first to arrive on the staging grounds (McNeil and Cadieux 1972; Morrison 1984; Gratto-Trevor 1992) and should, hypothetically, be ex-posed to fewer parasites than adult males and juvenile birds that arrive later (Didyk 1999). We know that parasites cause stress in their hosts, more or less proportional to the level of infection, compromising host condition through tissue damage, loss of nutrients and even behavioural changes. Because parasite loads are higher on the staging grounds in the Bay of Fundy than at any other time of the birds ’ annual cycle (Didyk and Burt, in prep.), parasitism-related stress is likely going to be highest during fall migration. In considering the possible effects that heavy parasite loads combined with contamination with heavy metals might have on migrating shorebirds, we first turned to a study of a wild population of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, carried out by a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick in