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 nations environment and its economy, Americas 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 well 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:  Ive 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 Ive 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, Ive never really compared it 
with the toe of a pig but I presume thats 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 dont 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 theyre 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 tens or hundreds 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 fishs 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.   Watts 
bar completed in 1942 is typical of impoundments built across the country in the 30s and 
40s.  Its 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 youve blocked the migration of a number of fish 
species that come up through the system, so essentially youre knocking out a potential a 
fish host.  What youve 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 youve 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 youll 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 Watts bar Ahlstedt and his team move from site to site sampling 
whats 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 30s and 40s 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, thats twice as many species as in all of Europe. Virginia techs 
fisheries professor Dick Neves surveys the find.

Dick Neves: Its 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, weve 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 conservancys 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 hasnt 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 cant 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 arent 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 Tolins 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 Tolins 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 whats 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 days activities.

Bill Tolin:  I always thought it could be here the habitat is here the fish hosts are here, 
its just a big river and its a big river muscle.

Narrator: But from what the divers collect and what the underwater camera shows, its 
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 isnt 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 
1950s.  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 muscles 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 its 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 its 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 thats 
endangered.

Lonnie Garner: The shell industry would never over harvest a population to extinction 
or anything like that.  Theres no endangered species of any value at all.  And its like 
you might have hear me say this before, but when your buying raccoon hides for $20.00 a 
piece you dont buy no possum hides its 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 doesnt just talk about their 
economic value.

James Peach: Muscles to me have a personal value, Ive 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: Its hard to care about something thats living in the bottom of a river or 
bottom of a stream which you dont see very often but its sort of like the canary in a 
mine, its really your first drawn line that youve got problems when you start seeing 
dead muscles or no muscles at all.  Theyre filter feeders and excellent indicators of water 
quality, and when you start losing them thats 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 theres a serious new threat to their existence, the 
zebra muscle.  How can one muscle be a threat to all the others?  Zebra muscles dont 
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 Americas 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 thats 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 1970s 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 theyve 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 hes keeping in cages protected from predators.  
Hes studying whether its 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 thats 
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 were a part of that eco 
system and we need to prevent all the parts that we live in.