Mussel/Car

My "river class" is going well, I think, with students seeming interested in learning and writing about their local waters. I'm learning things too. Yesterday a grad student from the enviromental science dept. visited to introduce us to some of the creatures that live in our campus river. Most of his talk focused on different species of pearly mussel, creatures I've often seen but knew absolutely nothing about. While I probably ought to restrict my pedagoguery to the classroom, these little bivalves are so fascinating I can't resist--and their breeding practices put them right at home on FTR.

Take a look at the photo below. How many fish do you see?



If you said four, look more closely. This is a stream enviroment, so fish will generally be looking upstream. So what's that fish--like thing atop the mussel facing downwtream? Basically, a fishing lure. Not one left by a two legged fisherman, but one spun out of a broken ray mussel. Mussels need to implant embyos in host fish to distribute them throughout a waterway and prevent their species from being swept further downstream with each generation. So different types of female mussels will spit out a mucous sac filled with the embryos (glochidia). Fish come along, see the sac, pounce on it--and then become surrogate mamas to the glochidia, which will detatch from the fish and take up their stations on the river bottom after about two weeks.

The snuffbox mussel actually catches and plays the fish, snapping its shell around the nose of fish that turn it over to look for flies underneath and implanting glochidia in the fish's mouth.



Here, you can watch a video of one of these encounters. The rest of The Unio Gallery, sponsored by Missouri State University, has other photos, videos, and news about freshwater mussels. Visit and learn.



As for the "car," part of this post...in another week or so, I will be driving home a new car. As of tuesday, I fulfilled my stated intention to drive my '97 Honda Civic until the wheels fell off. They didn't literally fall off, but a mechanic informed me that they might if I kept driving it. So we're on the hunt for a car now, and while it will be nice to have a new one, I will miss our old Honda. It's carried us across the country and through many notable life passages in the last nine years. A few fishing trips too. It also had the most important attribute any car can have: it was paid off!

Adding another car payment will be a pain, but I guess that's better than careening into ditches, or oncoming semis.