Clinch River Mussels
Although
the floodplain is brimming with
life, the Clinch River's true claim to
fame lies beneath the surface. I dig my hands into the sand along
the river bottom, and before long my fingers touch something
hard. The flowing water washes away dirt and reveals an elongated
seashell --- one of the Clinch's many freshwater mussels.
The Clinch is
home to 45 species of these mollusks, with names ranging from the
evocative Little-winged Pearlymussel to the less enticing Tennessee
Heelsplitter. Although they all look pretty much the same to the
untrained eye, their astonishing diversity is one of the Clinch's main
claims to fame. For a bit of perspective, you'd have to explore
every stream in Europe and temperate Asia to find as many species!
Adult mussels
are sedentary, moving no more than a few inches along the bottoms of
the rivers and spending their time flushing water through their bodies
and extracting microscopic organisms to eat. Their young,
however, are more adventurous. Mother mussels trick fish into
coming close by showing off fleshy appendages that act as bait.
When a fish swoops close to eat the "bait", the mussel shoos her babies
out into the water and they dash to latch onto the fish's gills where
they'll spend the rest of their early childhood.
Like the picky caterpillars of the
Pipevine Swallowtail, each species of
mussel has a different species of host fish which it uses as its
nursery. Perhaps a decline in their host fish is partially
responsible for the recent loss of mussels from the Clinch River ---
whatever the reason, over the last few decades, species after species
has dropped out of sight. In the 1960s, 53 mussel species were
found in the Clinch, but more recent surveys have only been able to
turn up 37.
An even more
likely reason for the plummeting diversity of the Clinch River is dirty
water. Both mussels and the fish they depend on require pristine
water to survive, and the Clinch River can no longer be considered
pristine. The Carbo coal-fired power plant a few miles upstream
from St. Paul has severely damaged the Clinch River through two toxic
spills, one of alkaline fly ash slurry in 1967 and one of sulfuric acid
in 1970. The combination of these two spills affected the Clinch
River for nearly 90 miles, all the way downstream to Tennessee,
and created a 12 mile dead zone in which nearly all mussel species were
killed.
In 2009,
Dominion Virgina Power began construction of a second coal-fired power
plant on the banks of the Clinch, putting the future of the remaining
mussels in jeopardy. Although appeals to the Virginia State
Corporation Commission, Department of Environmental Quality, and
various legislators have been ignored, a groundswell of opposition has
sprung up around the region. Please take a few minutes to write
to your congressmen and ask that the Clinch's unique beauty be
protected for future generations to enjoy.
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