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The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Program (SBSPRP) is the largest wetland restoration project in the western United States, restoring approximately 15,000 acres of former salt evaporation ponds (southbaysaltpond.org) to benefit wildlife and fish populations. Restoration on a large scale comes with many risks and uncertainties. Therefore, restoration was planned in several phases, with an adaptive management approach and applied scientific studies to address the uncertainty of different restoration strategies. These strategies included breaching ponds to create fully tidal habitats, installing tide gates to create muted tidal habitats and active management of existing ponds. This mosaic of restoration designs was intended to benefit many species of salt marsh dependent biota, including birds, fish and mammalian species.

The Longjaw Mudusucker (Gillichthys mirabilis) is a resident estuarine fish, ranging from Mexico to Humboldt Bay, California, USA, and is one of the most abundant fishes in high intertidal salt-marsh habitat. The Longjaw Mudsucker depends on high intertidal creeks in marshes dominated by pickleweed (Sarcocornia sp). The fish reside within burrows in soft sediments and is the only fish species that can remain in intertidal creeks during low tide when the creeks completely de-water. Longjaw Mudsucker have a wide tolerance range for salinity, up to 80-ppt and can be the only fish species to occupy industrial salt ponds in the San Francisco Estuary.

In this study, UC Davis conducted minnow trap sampling in remnant pickleweed marshes and adjacent salt pond restorations to document the distribution, relative abundance, and condition (length-weight) of fish occupying these extant and restored habitats. During the pilot effort in late summer-fall of 2010 we conducted minnow trap sampling across a number of sites in the Alviso Marsh, Eden Landing Marsh, Ravenswood Marsh and Bair Island Marsh, sampling muted restoration ponds, tidal restoration ponds and remnant marsh habitats adjacent to restoration sites. From February 2011 to July 2012 we focused efforts in two tidal restoration ponds in the Alviso Marsh (A6 and A21) and one muted restoration pond in the Ravenswood Marsh (SF-2) on approximately monthly revisit schedule.