Saving America's Pearly Mussels Virginia Tech Narrator: “In the Ohio river divers and underwater cameras survey the bottom. On a roadside stand in Alabama buyer and seller conduct their business on the back of a pickup truck. And at Virginia Tech researchers seek new ways to help endangered species. The object of these activities in Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, and ten other states drained by the Ohio River system is a simple little creature that plays an extraordinary role in our nation’s environment and its economy, America’s fresh water muscle. Submerged in the clear and clean waters of rivers and lakes and ponds and streams around the world, is a little known and but incredibly diverse group of animals know as fresh water muscles, they are mollusks, shell fish descended from their salt water relatives the oysters and clams. They are simple creatures consisting of a soft body with in two hard shells. The body has gills for breathing a digestive track for eating and a large muscular foot to help the muscle move. The muscle extracts minerals from the water and turns it in the shell material adding one thin layer at a time. The interior of the shell is made of a pearly substance called nacre. While the shell offers some protection muscles serve as a major food source for predators such as herons, raccoons and muskrats. And muscles offer many other benefits as we’ll learn more about later. Malacologists or people who study shell fish use size, shape, color, and markings to identify species. While each individual species has a Latin name most have a colorful common name as well, the pig toe, the purple pimple back, the pocketbook, and pistol grip and more.” David Stansbery: “I’ve had the dubious honor of naming some of these, such as the shiny pig foot for example and the ebony shell. “ Narrator: “Ohio state professor David Stansbery is the curator of one of the largest collections of freshwater muscles in the world, a collection of close to 2 million specimens.” David Stansbery: “What I’ve always tried to do is pick a characteristic of the shell and use that in its name because that would help the armature or the commercial fisher, and the scientists can ignore it if they wish. The ebony shell is black, and the shiny pig toe is shiny. The whole group was named pig toe to begin with, I’ve never really compared it with the toe of a pig but I presume that’s what it looks like.” Narrator: “And there are plenty of species to name, more then 1000 world wide. Nearly a third of those are found in North America and nearly half of those in the Ohio, Tennessee and their tributaries. But that kind of diversity is threatened dozens of muscle species are on the edge of extinction. Nearly twenty are all ready gone, and it is the way muscles live that is contributing to the way they are dieing. An adult muscle lives a passive life on or partially in the bottom the substrate of a lake or stream. And while they can use their foot to move around, most adults move no more then a few hundred yards in their life times, life times as long as 60 years. But if they don’t move very much how did they get to be as wide spread as they are? The answer is in the way they reproduce. After fertilization embryos develop in the female for any ware from two to ten months. Then in mid to late spring the female releases the mature larvae now called glochidia. The glochidia drift in the water until if they’re not eaten they attach to a fishes gills and fins. Often a specific type of muscle needs a specific type of fish, such as a blue gill or a bass. To attract a host fish a female muscle will some times use a lure, flapping part of her body to look like potential food. It is an ingenious way to give the glochidia a chance to hitch a free ride.” David Stansbery: “They can be transported many ten’s or hundred’s of miles, maybe even a thousand miles to a different habitat and by this means they can expand their range, become more numerous have a better chance of surviving.” Narrator: “With out a host fish the glochidia will die, so if a host fish is driven out of a river buy pollution or other problems, the muscles that need that fish will eventually die off. Attached to the host fish for one to two weeks the glochidia mature as tiny white specs feeding off the fish’s blood. Dozens of glochidia may attach to a fish with out killing it. Where a host fish goes so go its glochidia and that is how a species spreads. Much more mobile then any adult muscle, the host fish provides mass transit for species future generations. After the free ride, still very tiny, the individuals drop off the host fish and the bottom dwelling life of the muscle begins first as a juvenile then as an adult.” Narrator: “Just below Watts bar dam in eastern Tennessee, Tennessee valley authority muscle expert Steve Ahlstedt leads a team trying to determine the health of muscles populations there, Ahlstedt measures and records muscles collected by divers. Watt’s bar completed in 1942 is typical of impoundments built across the country in the 30’s and 40’s. It’s affect on muscles is typical as well.” Steve Ahlstedt: “These muscles have not reproduced sense Watts bar damn was built essentially what we have is a terminal population of shells here.” Narrator: “While a few thin shelled species do seem to be reproducing below the damn, most are not. Completion of the damn changed the conditions under which the species had lived for millions of years.” Steve Ahlstedt: “In some instances you’ve blocked the migration of a number of fish species that come up through the system, so essentially you’re knocking out a potential a fish host. What you’ve got to consider to is that before they built this damn, this section of the river was very revering so you had many species of guarders, minnows, and shiners that occurred through the shallow water, and once you impound that water they might not have been able to adapt them selves to those kinds of conditions. Fish move out and then you’ve lost your reproduction capabilities of your native muscles.” Narrator: “Dams present a whole series of threats for fresh water muscles, behind a dam fast moving water slows down and silt and sediment settle out muscles can be smothered.” David Stansbery: “When you put a dam in a stream the water backs up behind it. What was once a free flowing stream mixing freely with the atmosphere getting oxygen from it and releasing carbon dioxide to it becomes a standing pool of water, if you’ll pardon the expression a stagnant pool of water.” Narrator: “With slower currents less food may reach a muscle, and less oxygen too. And turning a river into a lake can make the water more acid, making the muscles there sick and weak. Back at Watt’s bar Ahlstedt and his team move from site to site sampling what’s left of the muscle population. The divers will search the bottom for eleven minutes, pulling up every live muscle they can find. The water is muddy, the current is swift, and the work is hard. The muscles brought up are counted measured and recorded. Back in the 30’s and 40’s of course no one knew that building a dam could so devastate the muscles in the Tennessee and the Ohio River basin. Now we know better and Dick Biggins an endangered species specialist with the U.S. fish and wildlife service understands the damage that has been done.” Dick Biggins: “One of the greatest diversities of fresh water muscles is contained with in the Tennessee river system. And with the building of impoundments these species were eliminated trough out much of the Tennessee River system. So we know have what was left of this once great fauna, the only place its left now is in the upper Tennessee River system and then the Clinch and the Powel and a few other rivers in the Tennessee River valley.” Narrator: “And maybe the Clinch most of all, away from the damns, away from the city. Away from most everything the Clinch still flows freely threw south West Virginia and its muscles survive. On a late summer afternoon a team of scientists has come to the Clinch river, at Pendleton Island a nature conservancy preserve. Snorkeling in knee deep water, and combing the area where muskrats eat, the group will find 32 species of shells in just a few hours, that’s twice as many species as in all of Europe. Virginia techs fisheries professor Dick Neves surveys the find.” Dick Neves: “It’s an extremely high diversity for such a short reach of river, we only sampled about 200 meters. And there are several endangered species, the fine-rayed pig toe, the shiny pig toe, birdwing pearlymussel, we’ve got several candidate species here as well.” Narrator: “For Neves and the others this harvest serves as a reminder of what the Tennessee river Valley once was and how many species once lived there.” Dick Neves: “The Tennessee River system in general is extremely old from a geological prospective, and there for there was lots of time for these species to evolve and speciate. So the high diversity we see in the Tennessee River and its tributaries relates back to the history of the river, and also the geological time that has occurred and allowed speciation to occur.” Narrator: “The nature conservancy is a private organization, trying to preserve threatened and endangered species. One way it does this is by buying the land where those species live. Don Gowan works in the conservancy’s south west Virginia office. Don Gowan: “The nature conservancy purchased Pendleton Island in 1985. Pendleton Island was recognized as one of the most important muscle concentration sites in the upper Tennessee basin.” Narrator: “But buying up the island, and the land around it hasn’t been enough. The freshwater muscles there are under siege.” Don Gowan: “They have a lot of the older age classes of muscles, the more mature muscles are still present you can go out a pick them up almost any day any time and place around the Island. But we can’t find young muscles one to five year old.” Narrator: “Trying to pinpoint an exact cause of the problem is difficult and in fact there may be no single cause. A sewage leak an industrial outlet pipe, things like that may contribute. But the fact of the matter is a lot of little things add up to degrade a stream, even cows. Just ask Virginia department of game and inland fisheries expert Sue Bruenderman.” Sue Bruenderman: “One of the primary problems with cows is the physical degradation of the banks their stomping. Another problem is the water quality problems associated with them standing in a stream. Things that aren’t really visible unless you take water quality analysis.” Dick Biggins: “A little bit of siltation is coming from this farm, a little from this road, a little from this housing development and so it all accumulates in to the river. And so what you have is a large accumulation of pollution siltation.” Narrator: “As this demonstration project shows, one small patch of land can dump a large amount of silt into a creek or river. And it all adds up, the silt buries the river bottom suffocation the muscles that simply can move out of the way. And lots of human activities add to the load. Construction and dredging in and along a river can contribute silt as well and stir up the bottom and cover muscles. Acid run off from coal operations can poison muscle populations all along the Appalachians as can fertilizers and pesticides that wash into rivers from farms. On a crisp and clear autumn day U.S. fish and wildlife biologist Bill Tolin leads a team surveying muscle populations in the Ohio river. Using a device called a brail Tolin’s crew literally combs the bottom looking for muscles. Any open muscle touched by the brails tips or dove tails will clamp down and hang on to be brought to the surface. Again and again Tolin’s brail brings up little or nothing as Tolin's boat moves up and down the Ohio in places that are supposed to be loaded with muscles.” Bill Tolin: “We were going down here to site eleven, and they had 106 muscles of nine species on the ground.” Narrator: “Three weeks later Tolin is back this time with a team of divers and an under water camera to better survey what’s going on at the bottom of the river. There is some good news, the discovery of an endangered Pink Mucket maybe 30 years old. It is for Tolin a bright spot in the day’s activities. Bill Tolin: “I always thought it could be here the habitat is here the fish hosts are here, it’s just a big river and it’s a big river muscle.” Narrator: “But from what the divers collect and what the underwater camera shows, it’s obvious to Tolin that something is wrong. He sets a trap and his suspicions are confirmed, the next days head lines announce the arrest of over a dozen men charged with illegally poaching muscles stealing them from the Ohio. While some states do allow commercial muscle harvesting, it isn’t allowed in this part of the Ohio. The men are prosecuted convicted and fined. It is for Tolin, a small victory the poached muscles after all are still gone. Human collection of fresh water muscles has a long history. Native Americans collected them for food and for trade. Depositing the shells in huge middens or mounds now found along the rivers of the Ohio basin. As settlers form Europe moved in they found the muscles meat tough and tasteless. But they did find value in the muscles shell, button factories sprang up where the muscles were plentiful, and millions upon millions of pearl buttons were manufactured from the muscles shells into the 1950’s. Then came plastic and the button factories closed down. But then another use was discovered for the shells of certain muscle species, a use that has blossomed into a 50 million dollar a year industry employing thousands of workers, cultured pearls. Cultured pearls are produced in Japan and a few other Asian countries by taking a bead or a pellet cut from a freshwater muscle’s shell and inserting it inside a saltwater oyster. The oyster then coats the bead with a pearly substance producing a cultured pearl. Where a natural pearl can take years to form a cultured pearl can take as little as nine months. The coating of such pearls is extremely thin so the interior bead has to be perfect. The shells of three major muscle species, the Three Ridge, the Maple leaf, and the Washboard Shell provide the kind of material that makes the best cultured pearls.” Lonnie Garner: “A good shell is usually judged first by the quality of it that is when you break it whether it’s got stains or cracks this is bad for the production. And the next step is the size and thickness of it.” Narrator: “Lonnie Garner should know a good shell around him and a half a dozen other men the commercial muscle industry has grown and flourished. From an open ware house in the north east corner of Alabama Garner owns and operates the U.S. shell company. It is the collection point for a network of more then a thousand muscle collectors across the eastern half of the country. While some states forbid any muscle others allow it under certain regulations. Most muscler's are part timers collecting on weekends or during summer vacation. Most of them dive using a system called a hookah rig usually homemade form available parts. Once turned on the rig sends compressed air down to a diver for hours. And the diver will stay down for hours for good reason, while prices fluctuate a diver can earn pretty good money for a days work. And at these prices one good size wash board will bring a diver $30.00. Garner has agents setting up shop on road sides through out areas of the south where muscling is legal, conducting their business on the back of the pickup truck. The shells usually come into the warehouse with the muscles still inside.” Lonnie Garner: “We steam them in a big vat, we do about 8000 to 10000 pounds at a time. We steam them for about 30 minutes it’s like a big clam bake then we throw them through a machine that knocks the meat out of them. Then they go up a belt and go in a pile and we send them through another machine that sizes them.” Narrator: “From there the shells are shipped to Japan or some other Asian country where beads will be cut from their nacre to make cultured pearls. Despite the gathering of millions of muscle shells each year. Garner claims the industry is not a threat to any muscle species, not to any of the three major commercial species or to any species that’s endangered.” Lonnie Garner: “The shell industry would never over harvest a population to extinction or anything like that. There’s no endangered species of any value at all. And it’s like you might have hear me say this before, but when your buying raccoon hides for $20.00 a piece you don’t buy no possum hides it’s just that simple.” Narrator: “Like Lonnie Garner, James Peach deals in muscle shells selling to Asian markets, but he sells here at home as well. At his store in Nashville Peach specializes in natural pearls found in Tennessee river system muscles.” James Peach: “I think the tremendous diversity, not only in color but in shapes of the natural pearls makes them the most exciting pearls in the world.” Narrator: “Peach is a student of muscles as well as a trader of them. His Nashville store includes a museum display showing some of the verity of muscles in North America, and when Peach talks about the value of fresh water muscles he doesn’t just talk about their economic value.” James Peach: “Muscles to me have a personal value, I’ve been around muscles all my life I enjoy the many different species of muscles from the Pistol grip to the Monkey Face to the Washboard shell.” Narrator: “Muscles have values that go far beyond their worth to the commercial muscle industry. For Steve Ahlstedt they serve as monitors of a rivers health.” Steve Ahlstedt: “It’s hard to care about something that’s living in the bottom of a river or bottom of a stream which you don’t see very often but it’s sort of like the canary in a mine, it’s really your first drawn line that you’ve got problems when you start seeing dead muscles or no muscles at all. They’re filter feeders and excellent indicators of water quality, and when you start losing them that’s a sign. Because we use this water to drink, a lot of people use this water, so they out to be sending out warning signals. Dick Neves: “They also have what I term esthetic values in terms of just being there and providing more diversity in the rivers and streams where they occur. They have scientific value, their probably the largest fresh water bi-valves that we have in this country and most places and there for they serve for scientific study in terms of how they function, and what they do in those systems. So there are multiple values that they have from a scientific esthetic stand point.” Narrator: “Indeed muscles are even used in biomedical research. Scientists have found their resistant to cancer and they want to know why. People who realize all these values of fresh water muscles are realizing that there’s a serious new threat to their existence, the zebra muscle. How can one muscle be a threat to all the others? Zebra muscles don’t need a fish host so they reproduce much more quickly then other muscles, by the thousands. In such numbers they eat a lot of food and take up a lot of space. Starving out and crowding out native muscle species. One way they spread up stream or from one river to another is by hitch hiking. Attaching to boat bottoms or getting into live wells in infested waters, and then dropping off when the boat is launched somewhere else. They can move in this way, hundreds of miles in a year. But efforts are being made to control the spread of the zebra muscles, efforts to preserve all of America’s pearly muscles. Extension programs are teaching boaters how to look out for zebra muscle hitch hikers to protect uninfected waters. And from scientist to average citizen more and more people are working in more and more ways to try too undo the damage that’s been done to Americas fresh water muscles. On a muggy may morning on the Tennessee and Virginia border a group of river lovers gathers to celebrate the Clinch and its sister river the Powel both threatened refuges for a wide verity of muscles fish and other creatures.” Narrator: “Karen Firehock directs the save our streams program for the Izaak Walton League a conservation group. In the next hour and a half see well teach these children how to protect the Clinch by monitoring its ecological health.” Karen Firehock: “Where it came from was an idea from the 1970’s where the only way you were really going to protect Americas water problem was through people getting involved, hands on volunteers at the local level who lived in the creek finding out what was going on in their water stead and taking steps to solve the problem. The idea of save our streams SOS sort of is a call for help for people to get involved in saving creeks.” Narrator: “Farmers too are getting involved, Bill Kittrell of the nature conservancy to build fences up stream form Pendleton Island. The fences keep cows out of the Clinch and keep silt and animal waste away form its muscles.” Bill Kittrell: “The farmers have been real corporative and responsive to it were at work on out forth project right now, and they’ve all been real interested in it. And as soon as they find out they have muscles in this river that are found in some places no where else in the world then they perk up and their suddenly real proud of that fact they are being good stewards of the river and organisms in the river.” Narrator: “State agencies through out the Ohio river valley are also working to save muscles and the waters in which they live. State biologists are cataloging and protecting and restoring rivers and lakes and streams one by one. And on the Ohio the U.S. fish and wildlife service is turning a 362 mile string of islands and their surrounding waters in to a national wild life refuge to better protect the muscles and other wildlife that live there. At a farm pond in the foot hills of the blue ridge mountains, Virginia tech graduate student John Burress checks muscles he’s keeping in cages protected from predators. He’s studying whether it’s feasible to store muscles in such environments to protect all kinds of muscles from zebra muscle invasions, and to breed endangered species to save them from extinction.” John Burress: “There are going to be some of the species that are lost. Simply because there is not that population there to begin with, but I think if successful here it can be a means of possibly reestablishing those endangered species in areas where they were established and are now non existent, as well as building up those populations where they are existent.” Narrator: “And scientists at Virginia tech are trying to create fish host substitutes. So muscle glochidia even when their fish host has gone away. The U.S. fish and wildlife service is distributing posters to teach children in the Ohio River basin about the importance and diversity of the muscles that live there. And on the Tennessee River system the Tennessee valley authority is looking to undo some of the damage that dam building has done to fresh water muscles.” Steve Ahlstedt: “In the next few years the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) has really launched a program to really clean up the Tennessee River system. And they are studying ways of improving the dissolved oxygen content in the water below all our dams.” Narrator: “Much of this work to protect freshwater muscles comes under the federal endangered species act.” Dick Biggins: “The purposes of the endangered species act which is an act that’s administered by the U.S. Fish and wildlife service is to identify those species that which are at risk of extinction. And then to develop recovery plans to try to bring those species back so that their not on the verge of extinction. You know the bald eagle was an indication of a collapse in the habitat because of DDT, and it brought a lot of public awareness about a lot of change in how we use pesticides. The endangered species act by carving a notice in freshwater muscles and fishes brings efforts to bare on aquatic eco systems.” Narrator: “But why all this effort? Why the setting up of preserves such as Pendleton Island? Why the posters? Why the painstaking work with microscopic glochidia? So what if one or two or even a dozen species of fresh water muscles are lost? When we lose a species we lose a potential cure for disease we lose a food source for other wild life and we lose a lot more. As Dick Biggins reminds up we lose a piece of the planet.” Dick Biggins: “All the life in these rivers is interconnected, and you begin to lose pieces of that life eventually the whole eco system will collapse and we’re a part of that eco system and we need to prevent all the parts that we live in.”