Biologists evaluate mussels in the Little River.
“Is this the road here?” Gary Peeples asks as the van approaches a dirt road in the middle of a cornfield.
“Go just a little farther and there’s a pull off on the other side of the bridge,” John Fridell replies.
Peeples, a public affairs officer with the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), pulls the van onto the grassy shoulder of a county road near the banks of North Carolina’s Little River. He and John Fridell, a FWS biologist, step out into the quiet valley.
A few months ago, the section of the river had been stocked with 30 mussels. Peeples and Fridell are hoping to locate some of those mussels and also get an idea of the health of the stream’s other species by doing an unofficial survey.
To do so, they slip into full-body wetsuits and strapped on dive masks, snorkels, and underwater cameras to get a fish-eye view of what the river is really like.
“Even if you’re out there fishing or paddling, you’re still looking at the water from above. But snorkeling gives you such an incredibly intimate look at the life of a river,” Peeples explains. “Fish are swimming around you, you see mussels and other aquatic life, and, really, you just become part of the river.”
One of the main species that indicates a healthy stream or river is the mussel, a small clam that once thrived in the rivers of western North Carolina. Abundant and diverse numbers of mussels suggests that the river is home to a variety of other aquatic wildlife.
“The well-being of the mussels reflects the well-being of the streams,” Peeples says. “The better the mussels are doing, the healthier the streams will be.”
Within minutes after entering the water, Fridell finds his first mussel: an Appalachian elktoe, which is one of eight species of mussels on the endangered list in North Carolina. The elktoe once lived in the majority of the rivers and larger creeks of the upper Tennessee River system in North Carolina. The species still survives in scattered pockets of suitable habitat in portions of the Little Tennessee, Pigeon, Mills, and Little River watersheds.
Snorkeling through the clear waters of the Little River, Fridell and Peeples scour the river bottom for the unmistakable sign of a mussel: two tiny holes in the sand and gravel that are the only visible sign. The two holes are used by the mussels to filter the water through their bodies.
“Each mussel is its own little wastewater treatment plant,” Peeples says. “Mussels clean the water for us, which is an incredible service they provide, free of charge, and one that we should support as much as possible.”
The biologists carefully remove the mussels, check to see if they had been tagged, make a note of the size and type of species, and then carefully return them to the exact same place they had been found.
In the late 1990s, the FWS had considered removing the Appalachian elktoe from the endangered species list because its numbers had begun to improve. But in the past few years, mussel populations have declined dramatically. Fridell believes the die-offs could have been caused by a combination of pollutants in the river and an extended drought, which reduced water levels and made the toxins in the water more potent.
“I’ve been working in this field for about 32 years now,” Fridell says. “I’ve seen changes that I wouldn’t have expected to see in my lifetime—just rapid degradation of aquatic systems. It’s just amazing to me how quickly we can destroy a lot of these systems. I’ve seen changes that I would rather not have seen, and for them to happen so quickly, I just didn’t expect it.”
Despite the overall decline in mussel populations, all hope is not lost. The Tuckaseegee River and parts of the Nolichucky are showing dramatic improvements. And today’s river snorkeling findings confirm that the Little River is doing remarkably well, too.
“It’s rare that you can go places and see the number of mussels and variety of aquatic wildlife that we saw today,” says Fridell.