Pulsed subsidy events create ephemeral fluxes of hyper-abundant resources that can shape annual patterns of consumption and growth for recipient consumers. However, environmental conditions strongly affect local resource availability for much of the year, and can heavily impact consumer foraging and growth patterns prior to pulsed subsidy events. Thus, a consumer's capacity to exploit pulse subsidy resources may be influenced by antecedent environmental conditions, but this has rarely been shown in nature and is unknown in aquatic ecosystems. Here, we sought to understand the importance of hydrologic variation and a salmon pulse subsidy on the foraging and growth patterns of two stream salmonids in a coastal southeast Alaska drainage. [...]
