Chapter 10
Mussel Resuscitation
What is usual is not what is always, the day says again.
It is all it can offer.
Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.
Only the reminder that there is exception.
Jane Hirshfield
This is an endangered species,” Andrew told me once in a southern Georgia creek, holding up the smallest of three mussels I had found, the one with the shabbiest shell, eroded and beat-up. Its dark, oval, finger-length shell identified it as Medionidas penicillatus, a Gulf moccasinshell. Native to the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, and Flint river basin, this mussel was critically endangered, an uncommon find, even in the fewer than twenty spots it was still known to survive. This particular mussel bore no tag, meaning it had not been found at this site before, and it looked like it might not be there much longer.
Andrew returned my three mussels to the creekbed, snorkeled a bit, and came back with thirty-four mussels. He laid them on the sand and began sorting them into groups. I watched, frowning. I felt like I had been developing an eye for mussel identification, but these dark ovals all looked completely the same.
I leaned over and picked up a straight twig. I broke it into equal sections and placed them on the sand. “This is what I see,” I said. My brain seemed determined to recognize sameness, to lump nature into sets of similarities. All creeks looked the same from the bridge; all small, oval bivalves were identical. Even in the global hotspot of mussel diversity, this richness could be lost on me.
Studying mussels, however, entices me to keep trying to identify uniqueness and revel in diversity. My eyes slowly learn subtleties, register particulars that otherwise blend into a world of decreasing variety. In the process, the streams themselves seem more intriguing, more full of character. My relationship with water changes.
In a 1977 speech, Luna Leopold—son of Aldo and the first chief hydrologist at the US Geological Survey—suggested that our management of water needs some deeper feeling, “a reverence for rivers.” Reverence—a deep respect, tinged with awe—captures the attentiveness of scanning a river bottom for apertures or the feeling of watching a wild mussel display. This reverence stirs mussel lovers to search for something more perfect, in places like a silty creekbed. It invokes the gurgle of water closing around my head as I seek the quiet lives that seem foreign to us but with whom we share more than we think.
A reverence for mussels cultivates a different consciousness, more subtle and complex. Riverbeds gain dimensions. Water seems animate. By moving us to consider a stream’s layers and vulnerability, mussels indicate more than ecosystem health. Their continued existence or disappearance will be evidence of how we shape our relationship with the water that supports life.
In that speech to drought-stricken California forty years ago, Luna Leopold also described a river as a living creature—a river organism that is “internally self-adjusting…resilient and can absorb changes imposed upon it, but not without limit.” This metaphor offers an opportunity especially compelling for a veterinarian. The river is not a place or a thing. It is alive and, as any living creature, can have health and disease. Now we can examine, diagnose, and work at treating the patient.
If we approach mussel decline as a disease, we can also—as David Strayer and his coauthors in their article “Changing Perspectives on Pearly Mussels” have done—borrow from epidemiologists’ bag of tricks. Epidemiologists deal with patterns and populations, taking a big-picture view of what causes health and disease. They have specific ways to prove that something in the environment is actually causing a disease—or mussel decline—ways to prove that it’s not just coincidental. And the study of diseases in populations poses many of the same challenges as figuring out what plagues a river. “In mussel ecology, as in medicine,” Strayer and his coauthors write, “it will be especially difficult to deal with the long-term and cumulative effects of chronic impacts.”
One reason for this difficulty is that multiple causes shrink mussel populations. Are excessive sediments or medications like fluoxetine in the water hampering their reproduction? Did a local landowner give his bulldozer a workout clearing a ford through the creek? Has a dam far upstream limited mussels’ access to host fish? Did the creek dry up last summer, affecting several mussel beds? As with many diseases, mussel declines usually have more than one contributing factor.
Also, in many cases, the mussel population dies slowly or simply fails to grow—dwindling in a slow atrophy toward extinction. With the exception of such dramatic events as chemical spills or dry creeks, mussel declines can occur over years or decades. When the arriving generation is smaller than the exiting adults, a population withers. If the adults live a long time, but hardly any juveniles arrive, the population develops an extinction debt. The mussels seem to be holding steady but are entirely aging. When death collects the older adults, the population will be bankrupt, having no youngsters to mature and reproduce. Extinction, then, can have a time lag, further complicating a search for the causes of it.
While some of the main causes of river injury remain the same, the top ten issues facing mussel conservation have shifted over time, partly because some headway has been made. We no longer harvest mussels wholesale as we did in the pearl and button eras. Our rate of dam building has plummeted since the 1980s, and in many places water quality has also improved. Twenty years ago, mussel biologists were sweating over newly invading zebra mussel populations and developing new strategies to move and propagate mussels. Now, newly emerging stressors—pharmaceuticals, personal-care products, excessive human water usage, climate change—pose dangers for mussels and rivers that require more investigation. The effects of our lifestyles permeate land and water, draining life from rivers. Mussels now face diffuse, chronic changes that keep chipping away at their populations, and these can be challenging problems to diagnose and treat.
When considering treatments, we want a prediction of how things might turn out. What is the prognosis for rivers, for mussels? As if he were a physician shaking his head, biologist Wendell Haag told me, “Truth be told, my outlook is pretty dim for the maintenance of the diversity that we have now. As there are more people and fewer wild things, people need more water, and those demands will come first.”
His words might prove accurate, and these pages might become just a eulogy for a lost tapestry of species. There is still a chance, though, that rivers—and many mussels—could be resuscitated. The lives that come after us—human and otherwise—depend on our attention to what we drink, what cleans us, where we find beauty. There are dead rivers, reduced to dry dirt channels. There are enigmas—mussels dying for reasons we don’t fully understand. But there are other mysteries too. There are mussels living in places we don’t expect, mussels discovered in places where they once seemed to be gone. Since many river organisms—even the Dead River—are not quite dead yet, we still have a chance to help them heal.
A prescription for curing mussel decline is not simple to fill. It requires actions we have only taken for a few rivers. Stop actively destroying streambeds, and then start restoring them. Change land-use practices to decrease run-off, sending fewer sediments, nutrients, and other contaminants into streams. Remove dams, or modify their structure or releases of water from them. While these actions might seem daunting, they are possible.
In Tennessee’s Duck River, for example, discovery of mussels—including endangered birdwing pearlymussels, Lemiox rimosus—halted construction of a dam that was almost complete in the 1980s. The unfinished dam was demolished in 1999, but disappointment and suspicion among residents remained. A partnership of local, state, and federal members began meeting to reestablish trust surrounding water management. Severe drought in 2007 tested their collaboration, but having a structure in place for communication and planning, they were able to manage water to provide for the needs of both people and mussels. Today, the Duck River provides water for human residents, boasts unprecedented mussel recovery, and remains one of the most diverse rivers in North America.
The Duck River story demonstrates that rivers, mussels, and people are both vulnerable and resilient. It illustrates a theme that repeats across river basins: collaboration to manage water results in healthier rivers. Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, writes in her essay in “Written in Water,” “As the unthinkable begins to happen, actions we thought impossible become possible. …Our innate love of life will rise up and call upon us, individually and in our communities and beyond, to do something with water we have so far found impossible to do: We will share it.”
Even mussel biologists, who are most intimate with rivers’ infirmities, cannot resist some optimism, especially given stories of regeneration and recovery. After stating his poor prognosis for mussel diversity, Wendell Haag immediately brightened. He commended the work of people propagating mussels, including Paul Johnson at the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center. “If anything gives you hope about the future of mussels, it’s that place,” Haag said.
Then he told me to visit Alabama’s Paint Rock River. “I visited back in the 1980s,” he said. “It was pretty much wiped out, with nothing left. Everything was old and beat-up. But now, that river is booming right along.”
The Paint Rock River is a freely flowing tributary of the Tennessee River and has a 460-square-mile watershed in the northeastern corner of Alabama. Extensive land-use changes and restoration work by The Nature Conservancy and other partners have transformed the river from a hurting, depleted system to a model of biological health and diversity. Collaborative efforts have altered land use along the Paint Rock and its tributaries, creating buffers and fixing banks in over thirty-seven stream-restoration projects. As described by The Nature Conservancy, the Paint Rock system supports more than one hundred fish species and about forty-five mussel species, including twelve globally rare mussels.
The Nature Conservancy’s Roy B. Whitaker Preserve embraces a mile and a half of the Paint Rock River and includes over three hundred acres acquired in 2005 and restored from rough pasture to floodplain forests and native grassland. With two-year-old Stella strapped to my front, I strode through tall grasses, some higher than Sam’s head as he grinned from Andrew’s shoulders ahead of me. Andrew led the way toward a two-dimensional backdrop of green hills against cloudless sky. The big and little bluestem grasses grew in a sea of yellow coreopsis, goldenrod, deep purple ironweed, lilac mistflowers, and various briars. This crowd of vegetation was as jubilant as our children.
At home, we had been talking about freshwater mussels the way other families discuss football—over supper, rooting for our favorites. Andrew was animated, telling stories and tossing around facts and ideas, a tactic that kept four-year-old Sam sitting still to eat. Stella was fully verbal but too busy cramming casserole into her mouth to talk much.
“Hey, you know what?” Andrew said. “We’re going to this special river that has all kinds of mussels in it so we can look for some really rare mussels. I’m really hoping to see this one special mussel that only lives in that river.”
“What’s its name?” I asked.
“Lilliput.”
“Is it tiny?”
“It’s tiny. And there’s another mussel that they’ve just recently found only one other place where it lives. Its name is the Alabama lampmussel, Lampsilis virescens.”
“That’s a long name.” Sam said, with a mouthful of casserole. He laughed trying to repeat it and lost a couple of black beans.
Andrew barreled ahead. “There’s one called a pink heelsplitter that I’m really hoping to see.”
“It’s pink!” Stella added.
“It’s pink on the inside, black on the outside. And it has a big wing.”
“What’s the wing for?” Sam wondered.
“Oh, good question. We don’t really know what it’s for. It’s not for flying.”
Sam looked a little disappointed, but he perked up at the mention of the shiny pigtoe, laughing with me as we imagined porcine extremities. He kept giggling at the Alabama lampmussel, no doubt taking that name literally, too, picturing a mussel sporting a lampshade. Unfortunately, the Alabama lampmussel is not funny, since it barely exists. Although we were planning our trip to the only place the Alabama lampmussel still lives, our chances of seeing one were Lilliputian.
A few days later, carrying our kids through the Roy B. Whitaker Preserve, we veered off the overgrown two-track, through the woods, and then hopped down tree roots in a steep bank to the Paint Rock River itself. To our left, the river pooled. Then it narrowed in front of us, hurrying over rocks. To our right, it widened again, slowed, and curved. We started poking around.
Andrew took the kids first. He pointed me toward a stretch around the bend, about three feet deep. I bent into a downward dog yoga pose and plunged my head in to the bottom, chilling my warm neck. The current surprised me, pushing my face, forcing me to grip the snorkel hard in my teeth. My jaws would be sore for two days. Immediately, the world of stones framed by my snorkel mask riveted me. I had just enough experience thinking like a mussel to know that this place was perfect. The substrate was a mixed bed of sand and medium-sized rocks—diggable, yet stable—and the river’s curve created just the right refuge from the main current.
Victorious, I stood and raised the first living mussel over my head—a shiny pigtoe, which we later voted as the prettiest mussel of the day. Elegant black stripes fanned across its yellowish shell, shaped like a typical clam.
All afternoon, we snorkeled and dabbled. The kids splashed around and chased the butterflies swarming on the banks. Stella stood waist-deep, blowing bubbles. Sam borrowed my snorkel mask and did somersaults in the water. Then he borrowed the water-tough camera and photographed mussels and his family members. The day smelled like the sun on our skin. We saw no trash, only lots of mussels.
We saw pink heelsplitters, which really do have a triangular wing angling like a sail into the water column, large and formidable. We saw variously sized threeridges, their shells rippling like crinkle-cut potato chips. We saw knobby-shelled rabbitsfoot mussels, shaped just like they sound. We saw fluted-shells and a couple of Lampsilis species. We saw one mussel that we couldn’t quite identify. We saw a snuffbox, another favorite because of the way its shell angled to form a flat surface where the slightly serrated edges meet.
All afternoon, we lifted mussels from the riverbed, cradled them in our hands, and photographed them in various poses like supermodels. By the time we’d eaten all our snacks and changed back to dry clothes, we’d seen—and carefully nestled back into the riverbed—thirteen species of live mussels. We also found shells of at least three other species. We loaded up kids, dog, and packs and hiked back through the woods, pausing to taste the fruit of a trifoliate lime tree—sour fruit, thorny tree—and to stare at the intricacies of a passionflower on a low vine. Sam chattered happily above Andrew’s head, while Andrew lost all feeling in his left arm under Sam’s weight. Stella dozed against my chest as we returned through the tall prairie.
The next day, at an access point just off the road, I stepped again into the Paint Rock River. Again, I saw my feet crisply under water that covered my thighs. The river bottom here was cobbled with multicolored stones, and I had the sense of being in an important presence, as a Catholic might when arriving at the Vatican. This was it. They were here.
I snorkeled near a sycamore tree, leaning over a small pool. As I moved forward, I traced my fingertips along the rocks, until one sizeable rock moved under my hand. I snatched my hand back, gurgling, “Oh my god,” through my snorkel. Its shell slowly cracked again, its apertures reopened. It loomed like a shipwreck, larger than anything around it. A mussel elder. I was loathe to disturb it. That mussel was a landmark in this pool; I could find it again easily, repeatedly. I photographed it. Eventually, I called Sam over to see and to help me uproot it temporarily. Andrew identified it as a threeridge mussel, Amblema plicata. I replaced it with gentle precision, like I was returning an organ to the abdomen during surgery.
Near my landmark mussel, I snorkeled over two orange flowers with black speckles. The fringed edges of their tubular structures waved in the current. I realized that these were a mussel’s fancy apertures, extravagant like pink flamingos. Watching them underwater, I saw how vibrant these closed shells are, living their lives. After taking photos, I lifted this mussel for identification: pocketbook, Lampsilis ovata. It was heavy and still in my hand, but I swear I could almost feel its pulse.
Diverse mussels living in the Paint Rock River
All along the Paint Rock River’s bottom, we found old mussel shells, scoured to white. Many of them were thick and broken into various shapes, with hooks and curves. These were the river’s bones, pieces of a skeleton that supports life. In this once-ailing river, the prognosis for mussels had looked grave; but attentive, collaborative care—restoring streams and managing land and water use—have been curative. According to mussels, the living Paint Rock River is healthy again.
Later, Andrew delivered into my hand a snuffbox. This one was mature, nearly square, and I could see its tiny denticles, serrations at its edge where it slammed closed onto the heads of log perch. As I gazed at its black markings, the little shell began to open. I worried, thinking it might be dying or injured.
The shell parted a few millimeters, and then out oozed a white foot, advancing steadily across my middle finger. It attempted to find purchase alongside my wedding band, sliding between my fingers. I stopped breathing when I felt the snuffbox lift off my hand, pushing downward with its foot muscle. It was crawling. On my hand. I nearly fainted with joy. I put it back in the river.
In July 2014, ten months after I felt the snuffbox’s strong, soft foot hoist its shell across my palm, Andrew texted me from the field. He sent me a photo of a wide, tree-lined river and the words, “Saying goodbye to the Flint. Thousands of mussels today and a sweet superconglutinate.”
We were digging out. We unearthed the title for our old Chevy pickup and found the shard of paper with a name and phone number. When we called him, the man remembered stopping by almost a year earlier, offering to buy the truck, and within two hours he arrived in an oversized smiley-face T-shirt and drove our truck away, fast. Just like that, we were heading north. I felt unsteady. The substrate of our lives was shifty, its changing pressures flowing past us.
We extended our feet into the unknown, leaving the specificity and fecundity our sojourn in the South had brought us. Less than three weeks lay between the job offer—tenure-track academia, a great fit for Andrew—and moving day. Andrew had given a phone interview in a wet suit, creekside, in northern Georgia. He received the job offer in a wet suit, near Sandy Creek in southern Georgia. To relay the details to me, he stood in the middle of the road near Ichauway-Notchaway Creek, angling for cell reception.
In August, we arrived in upstate New York, which glaciers once pushed and pulled and whose coastal plain lacks cypress swamps and huge reptiles. We nestled more permanently into this landscape, buying a dilapidated farm and digging new roots where the year flows in four crisp seasons, and water drains from our hilly property to the Mohawk River on its way to the Hudson.
We visited nearby Schoharie Creek, where Sam donned the fluorescent green snorkel, and Stella wondered if we’d see alligators. It seemed like a three-year-old’s whimsy, until I remembered that she actually had been in creeks with the possibility of alligators. I wondered what our kids would carry with them long after the South’s red dirt left their fingernails.
Wading barefoot, I scanned the bottom for apertures, seeking mussels native to this creek—yellow lampmussel, fluted-shell, elktoe, and declining eastern elliptio, whose most effective host is the American eel. Without mussels, the creek would seem flat and dim, like a computer screen in sleep mode. I tried to remember how a wet, dense mussel felt alive in my hand.
We are not naiades like mussels, our survival bound to specific river systems, but we do become attached to the land and water of a particular place. We, too, need the intersection of water and earth, habitat we must share with other beautiful animals. Mussels awaken us to the exquisite vulnerabilities of freshwater. The lives that come after us—human and otherwise—depend on our attention to what we drink, what cleans us, what beauty flows through our lives. Our children need us to engage our reverence for rivers. We begin by noticing the creek running under the bridge. We find life at river bottom.
Just upstream, Andrew’s snorkel poked up—a sign of optimism—so I squatted, peering close, ready to immerse myself again.