Could three pregnant freshwater mussels named Elizabeth, Imogene and Nelly residing in a University at Buffalo aquatics lab be the key to a new effort to clean up the Niagara River?
University at Buffalo researchers hope so. The three mussels are at the center of a three-year research project to see if freshwater mussels can be reintroduced to help clean the Niagara River.
The team led by UB assistant professors Isabel Porto-Hannes and Corey Krabbenhoft received a $500,000 grant from the New York Power Authority for a pilot study that could spawn much more research, Krabbenhoft said.
The project aims to improve not just the future of the river, but the future of freshwater mussels, which are the most endangered group of organisms in the U.S. due to decades of water pollution.
“There are 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, and 75% of them are either imperiled or extinct,” Porto-Hannes said. “Native freshwater mussels were here before humans set foot on this continent, and they are disappearing.”
While susceptible to many threats, freshwater mussels are also able to digest some contaminants that harm other species. They filter water as they feed, serving both as cleaners of the water they ingest and as indicators of water quality – the aquatic equivalent of canaries in a coal mine.
For the research to succeed, the UB scientists will need to have their three female mussels procreate, in hopes of creating a colony of thousands of mussels that then can be restored to specially targeted areas of the Niagara River and, ultimately, other waterways. Part of the challenge is raising mussels that will survive in an environment that may prove inhospitable to some native species.
Unlike zebra and quagga mussels – the invasive species of mussels getting all the attention these days – native freshwater mussels burrow into creek, river or lake beds where they oxygenate the substrate and help with nutrient cycling,…
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