Mollusks Get Experimental Homestead

.c The Associated Press

 By KATHERINE RIZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Government biologists want to put more mussel into Muscle
Shoals. They're ready to reintroduce into the famous Alabama riverbeds
mollusk species washed out by reservoirs on the Ohio, Cumberland and
Tennessee rivers.

Building new homesteads for up to 16 species of endangered mussels may sound
simple, but they're such complicated creatures that researchers spent decades
figuring out how to do it.

``It's 20 years of work that I've been working with these animals to get to
this point,'' said Richard Biggins, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fish and
mollusk recovery coordinator.

Techniques to move mollusks to a mussel-free portion of the Tennessee River
were developed by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Tennessee
Technological University, he said.

At least 34 species of mussels have disappeared from Muscle Shoals, a 53-mile
stretch of the Tennessee River once thought to have the world's greatest
collection of freshwater mussels, he said.

Dams and reservoirs built in the 1920s and 1930s wrecked mussel habitat along
the Tennessee and other rivers, covering breeding grounds with 20, 30 or 40
feet of calm lake when the creatures needed two or three feet of flowing
water. The cold reservoir water didn't kill the mollusks, but impeded their
breeding.

``It's like putting somebody in jail where they couldn't reproduce but could
live long lives,'' Biggins said.

Some mussels lived 100 years, giving the false impression of survival after
the damming of the rivers.

A section of Muscle Shoals in Alabama's Colbert and Lauderdale counties,
selected as the new home, was part of the historical range of the different
mussel species but not currently home to any of them. That should make it
easier to determine the success of the human-assisted colonization.