He is working on donating the meat to the San Antonio Zoo, but questions about nutritional value, cold storage, and transportation have yet to be answered. The pearl and shell industries in the United States may be small, but together they are a multimillion-dollar enterprise that relies on a natural state resource and public waters for existence. The quantities of shells removed from streams are unknown. It's only because mussels sometimes contain pearls that they inspire any interest at all. They are not cute and furry, they taste worse than gar or armadillo, and they're hardly ever seen.
Some people fear that every word written about freshwater pearls threatens the mussels' existence.
But a given area is seldom completely depleted by shell divers. Once the concentration of mussels becomes too sparse, the site is abandoned, and over the years it usually has time to recover. Casey believes that if the current harvesting and environmental standards aren't improved, some species of freshwater mussels in the Texas Hill Country are headed for certain extinction.