Mussels

 Today I attended a webinar sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources about mussels. The speaker was a young and passionate woman who works at the mussels lab in Lake City, Minnesota. I have toured that lab before but I don't think she was the one who lead the tour. The labs takes mussels from streams like the Mississippi, the Cannon river and the Saint Croix river and propagates them in glass aquariums. She showed us pictures of mussels, remarked on their beauty, and remarked on some of the funny names. When the mussels are a year old and about the size of your smallest fingernail they can be returned to the stream. Using super glue the researchers put trackers on them. The next year they find about 40% of the mussels they tracked. By that time the mussels are two inches around. She showed us video of two aquariums full of murky green water. With a time lapse camera on both tanks we watched as the tank with mussels became crystal clear and the tank without mussels remained murky over a four hour time span. Mussels can move around in the water. Mussels use various tricks to lure fish to them so they can squirt their babies into the fish's face. Some fish are startled when a cloud of baby mussels comes into their face. One mussel attracts fish by sticking what looks to be a blow fly out of their shell. One mussel attracts the fish in by waving a black leg like structure and when the fish comes for it the mussels clamps onto the fish's head and holds on tight until they are done feeding their babies into the gills. That is remarkable. She said the tiny fish has a boney head and is not harmed. She also said that in the past the solution to pollution was dilution. True, the houses on the Mississippi faced away from the water and all the trash went into the river. She showed us a picture of a massive mat of sewage on the Mississippi and it was disgusting. Times have changed. Houses now face the water and the trash goes out to the street. In the 1800's, a man from Germany decided to use mussels to make buttons. She showed us a picture of two barges on the Mississippi in Iowa loaded with mussels. A person stood on top of the largest pile of mussel shells. I don't know how tall that person was but the mussels would have reached over their head. As recently as the 1990's people from Japan were taking mussels from the Mississippi to cultivate pearls in their oysters. About 50 people were in attendance at the Webinar and one of them asked if she needed any volunteers. She responded that they are putting together a citizen scientist program which she hoped would be available next year. She mentioned that there are zebra mussels in Mille Lacs Lake and in the Ottertail River. Zebra mussels don't need fish to procreate. Zebra mussels send their babies right into the water. Zebra mussels cling to any hard substrate such as a rock, a pipe, a boat, a board, or another mussel. The native mussels cannot get the zebra mussels off of them so eventually they cannot move. I really enjoy listening to people who are passionate about their work.