Freshwater mussels are the most endangered group of animals in the world.
I am studying freshwater mussels to find why they are disappearing so rapidly and to use them as a model system to study the processes of population and species extinctions. We are studying a series of lakes in Iowa and Minnesota to determine the characteristics of aquatic ecosystems leading to the rapid disappearance of mussels. We have observed huge mass die-offs of mussels and diagnosed the causes of mussel death. Projects in my lab are analyzing the physical factors influencing mussel distributions in lakes, their selective feeding compared to zebra mussels and other organisms,.and developing genetic markers needed to test hypotheses about the influence of isolation on homozygosity in mussel populations. Spurred by some observations suggesting inbreeding as a cause of mussel extirpation, we have learned to extract genomic DNA from Lampsilis tissue.