Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology Commons^™

Quantifying Insect Emergence In Tidal Freshwaters And The Importance Of Aquatic Prey In Wetland-Dependent Songbird Diet, Samantha L. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Insectivorous birds and their arthropod prey are experiencing widespread population declines, driven largely by anthropogenic disturbance and climate change. For wetland-dependent insectivores that consume a mixture of terrestrial and aquatic insects, understanding the availability, consumption, and nutritional qualities of aquatic diet subsidies is important for conservation. I use prothonotary warblers (Protonotaria citrea) as a model species throughout this work, because their breeding season aligns with aquatic insect emergence and they include aquatic insects when provisioning nestlings. In the first chapter, I estimate aquatic insect emergence from tidal freshwaters, which are understudied compared to nontidal systems. Using continuous field …