Digging bait worms reduces birds' food.People who collect too many bloodworms for fishing make life tough for migrating shorebirds. When commercial harvesters dug worms from a mudflat Mudflats are coastal wetlands that form when mud is deposited by the tides or rivers, sea and oceans. They are found in sheltered areas such as bays, bayous, lagoons, and estuaries. in Canada's Bay of Fundy Noun 1. Bay of Fundy - a bay of the North Atlantic between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; noted for rapid tides as great as 70 feet Atlantic, Atlantic Ocean - the 2nd largest ocean; separates North and South America on the west from Europe and Africa on the east , the disruption destroyed other creatures that semipalmated sandpipers eat, researchers report in the April CONSERVATION BIOLOGY. Trouble in this bay could have a huge impact on the species, warn coauthors Philippa C.F. Shepherd of Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University, main campus at Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada; provincially supported; coeducational; chartered 1963, opened 1965. The Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver opened in 1989. in Burnaby, British Columbia “Burnaby” redirects here. For persons sharing this surname, see Burnaby (surname). Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is the city immediately east of Vancouver. , and J. Sherman Boates of Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia Wolfville is a small town in the rural Annapolis Valley, Kings County, Nova Scotia, Canada, located about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of the provincial capital, Halifax. As of 2001, the population was 3,658. . At least half the semipalmated sandpipers in the world--some estimates say 95 percent--gather at the Bay of Fundy as their last-chance feeding ground before a southward, nonstop migration of some 2,400 kilometers. "Whenever you have an organism that's concentrated in one place, it's vulnerable," Boates frets. New Englanders have long harvested the worms Glycera dibranchiata to sell to fishing enthusiasts. As U.S. bloodworm bloodworm, name for the larva of the midge and for a red-blooded marine polychaete worm. supplies dwindled, collecting moved north. In 1985, harvests began in the Bay of Fundy's sandpiper habitat. Shepherd studied a mudflat evenly populated by the birds' main prey, the mud shrimp Corophium volutator. After just one season of commercial worm digging, the harvested section had only 62 percent as many mud shrimp as the intact mud did. By counting birds' pecks and captures, Shepherd found that the sandpipers had to work harder when they strayed onto the digging grounds. She points out that the birds have only 10 days to 2 weeks to gain 20 grams of fat, approximately doubling their weight. The idea that the bait frenzy could ruin the Bay had occurred to some of the harvesters. "When I first started, it was every man for himself," remembers Arthur Purchase of Kentville, Nova Scotia Kentville is a town in Kings County, Nova Scotia. It is one of the main towns in the Annapolis Valley, and it is the county seat of Kings County. As of 2006, the town of Kentville had a population of 5816 people and the Kentville area had a population of 25,969, although it is . After he heard about the research's preliminary results, he helped form the Kings County Bait Fishermen's Association. Members leave parts of flats undug and harvest only mature worms. Sandpipers still funnel through the Bay in relatively good numbers, says Peter Hicklin of Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service in Sackville, New Brunswick. He praises Shepherd and Boates for giving credibility to the ongoing conservation effort to protect delicate ecosystems and prevent worm overharvesting. "What happened in the New England states won't happen here because of this work," Hicklin says. |
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