Immersion by Abbie Landis

I

mmersion

the science and mystery

M

of freshwater

ussels

abbie gascho landis

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Immersion

The Sc ien c e a nd My s t er y o f Fr e sh wa t er Mussels

By Abbie Gascho Landis

Washington | Covelo | London

Š 2017 by Abbie Gascho Landis All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher:

Island Press, 2000 M St., NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036 Island Press is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957616 Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: Alabama, Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin,

Bivalvia, Chattahoochee River, Chewacla Creek, dams, Endangered Species Act, extinction, filter feeders, freshwater pearls, freshwater mussels, Georgia, gills, glochidia, Gulf pigtoe, little spectaclecase, Mollusca, Paint Rock River, pistolgrip, pollutants, rivers, shell, southern fatmucket, Tennessee River, Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, Unionidae, water scarcity, water quality

For Andrew.

For Sam. For Stella.

For the river animals.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1:

Breaking Water

Chapter 3:

The Lure of Mussels

Chapter 2: Chapter 4: Chapter 5:

Chapter 6: Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Chapter 10:

1

Rocks with Guts

29

Search Images

87

Mussel Memory

Life at River Bottom The Dead River

55

111

133

167

When to Clam Up

189

Mussel Resuscitation

229

Acknowledgments

245

Holding Water

Selected Bibliography

211

249

Chapter 1

Breaking Water

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Rainer Maria Rilke

O

n a Ma r c h d a y in 2009, nine y ears af ter Chewacla Creek dried up, I stood in the r oadside weeds near a count y r oad br idge in Alabama. The creek—the city of Auburn’s water supply—was flowing again, thanks to legal pr otection. I was wiggling first my legs, then my arms, into a borr owed w et suit. I lef t it unzipped while I bent o ver, one hand o n the tr uck’s tailgate f or balance.

My other hand r eached to shoehor n my sneakers o ver neoprene booties. I str aightened, returning my attentio n to the zipper . It gaped like an open shel l, displaying my pregnant belly, almost f our months round. With effort, I zipped up the t wo halves, encasing myself. My first child would dangle below me while I snorkeled—something I’d never done before.

1

2 Immersion

I ha d joined this A uburn Univ ersity field crew o n a whim, based o n a last-minute in vitation. S topping b y a sporting goods store on the way, I had purchased a snorkel mask. The kid-sized snor kels fit my face better than adult ones, so I now carried a cartoonish fluorescent green snorkel, in contrast to everyone else’s blue or black professional-looking gear. One these biologists was my husband, Andrew. He watc hed his whole f amil y squee ze into my wet suit, then pointed us toward the creek.

We thr ashed along, dropping down a steep bank, departing the road where it headed over the bridge. I picked my footing and eyeballed poison ivy, glad for the neoprene suit. S tepping into the cr eek, w e spr ead out and mo ved upstream, away from the bridge where we had parked the truck. I sank to my knees, letting cool water flow over my thighs. It was shal lower than a bathtub . When I eased f orward o nto my hands, the water didn ’t e ven co ver my back. Biting the snor kel mouthpiece , I sub merged my head thr ough a la yer of cr isp-edged leav es and into an other world.

A fish darted close—its eyes, its finely lined fins. Its gills clapped against its head as if it was slowly applauding my green-rimmed face. The creek filled my wet suit and filled my ears, dimming other sounds, gurgling thr ough my head like a pitcher pouring into an endless glass. I reveled in the bright underwater world, delighting at each colorful darter slipping in and out of view. Sediment stayed on the creekbed, leaving the water c lear until my fingers sw ept the rocks, raising a cloud. I grazed my belly upstream into better visibility, moving slowly to the rhythm of my breath whooshing up and down my snorkel.

Breaking Water 3

Months later, when I learned the word for this creekbed world—benthos—I would remember each curled snail and crayfish scooting backward. The river bottom, the depths, the benthic botto m dw ellers. I met the benthos f a ce to face.

Then I lifted my hea d and r ealized I ha d f al len w ell behind the others. I slur ped my self to a standing posi tion and wa ded toward the bank. They had told me that the creek’s edges often held many hidden freshwater mussels. Finding those mussels was our purpose for snorkeling Chewacla Creek in March.

Look f or two small openings, they told me . Like t wo short tubes of ten stic king up just a bit f rom the m ud.

“Once you get your search image, it’s easy,” Professor Jim Stoeckel, a compact man who rarely stood still, assured me from across the creek. “You’ll really start seeing mussels.”

After about an hour, the extent of S toeckel’s optimism became apparent. I ha d pluc ked and flipped and groped at least fifty rocks, leaves, twigs, and lumps in the mud. I’d never seen a m ussel in the wild. My search image, which resembled t wo shor t dr inking str aws po king out of the mud, wavered like a mirage.

“It’s really hard to descr ibe what to loo k f or,” Andrew told me later. “I look for what is not mud and rocks. Something that has a par ticular shape. Something that ’s more perfect than everything surrounding it.”

I refocused, remembering photos I’d seen, and tried to imagine our quarr y. These are not the coal-bla ck ocean mollusks clinging like butterflies to rocks or jumbled o n plates under decadent sauces. Neither are they the notorious z ebra m ussels, Dreissena p olymorpha, in vasive spe -

4 Immersion

cies plaguing r ivers and lakes nor th of her e. The family Unionidae, native f reshwater mussels, lives in cr eeks and rivers and includes almost three hundred species in North America. Nearly 70 percent of them are imperiled.

These freshwater mussels live mostly buried. Their shell edges are par ted like a sur prised gasp, exposing t wo apertures. One intakes and the other r eleases water, which is ho w m ussels eat, br eathe, and e ven gather sper m to meet their eggs. Those apertures actually look like Geor gia O’Keefe paintings—flowers, female anatomy—elegant ovals decorated with var iously shaped and color ed papillae. Apertures, papillae, curve of a shell. This is our search image.

Although I did not see her , a m ussel was ther e, near my f eet. S ometimes, sid ling alo ng with o ne meat y f oot, this mussel would leave a tr ail, but no w she nestled into sandy clay. Above this mussel, water flowed. Water flowed quickly, riffling and tugging her. Sometimes water bar ely flowed at al l, pooling in the dr y summer. S ometimes it flowed like c appuccino, dense with par ticulate, challenging the mussel’s filtering gills. Other times it flowed clear from bottom to surface, like today.

We stood in our w et suits, leaning to ward the cr eekbank. A ndrew pointed; I str uggled to see what he de scribed. Bet ween my pr otruding abdo men and taut w et suit, I couldn ’t bend my waist, so I bent my knees and tipped forward.

“She’s displaying,” he told me. He waited while I stared.

Then the m ussel seemed to mater ialize, differentiating f rom the leav es and r ocks. Bef ore my e yes, the cr eek bottom gained a dimensio n as I per ceived its complexity.

Breaking Water 5

A little specta clecase, Villosa lienosa, was doing the w ork of a f reshwater mussel—filtering. She was also doing the work of many females this time of y ear—displaying. Her gills bulged with offspring that she’d brooded for months.

Now the time had come. Above those offspring waved her mantle lure, decorated with multiple tentacles that looked like a clump of small black worms. The bait.

Ripe with progeny, the female mussel must attract a fish to deliver her babies into the world. Striking the bait,a fish will release thousands of these larval mussels, which will hitch a ride on the fish’s gills, transforming into independent juveniles and then letting g o and sinking into their new creekbed lives. I was impressed. Delivering offspring into the world clearly demanded heroic efforts.

I recognized this turning inside out for the next generation. This mussel and I were similarly vulnerable, preparing to empty our bodies into the future. Watching a wild mussel display her lure opened a door in my mind,like my first kiss. I became a freshwater mussel groupie. I fawned over their photographs, mussels ranging in siz e f rom thumbnail to dinner plate , building glassy or r idged or pimpled shells that ar e brown or bla ck or y ellow, with or without dark stripes fanning across them, and always paved inside with pearl—white, pink, deep violet. I stalked them from a distance, writing their names in my notebooks: fatmucket, pistolgrip, heelsplitter, shinyrayed pocketbook, spectaclecase, pigtoe, snuffbox. I pored o ver their bios. Posters of mussels hung in our bedroom.

6    Immersion

Largemouth bass striking a finelined pocketbook lure

Freshwater mussels are old. As a group, they have persisted and adapted across, some scientists estimate, around five hundr ed mil lion y ears. Mussels shar e a f amil y-tree branch with other mol lusks. Their phylum, Mol lusca, includes snails and slugs, squids and octopus, and c lams and sc allops, to name a f ew. Their class, Bival via, nota bly features multitasking gills. These versatile organs help with r espiration, ex cretion, and r eproduction. Br eathing, defecating, and making babies all coincide in one efficient organ.

Mussels ing est par ticles suspended in water dr awn

Breaking Water 7

across their gills, which sort particles as edible or inedible.

The water flowing in Alabama’s creeks and rivers, the water sitting in catfish ponds and reservoirs, the water gushing from my own faucet, has probably passed through the interiors of freshwater mussels. As they filter feed, mussels also ingest contaminants into their sensitive bodies. Mussels burrow at the intersection of water and earth, so they suffer with disr uptions to both cr eek channel and water .

Their life cycle requires fish to host their parasitic larvae, linking mussels to vulnerable fish diversity. In these ways, mussels embody the whole river.

These mussels hav e been c alled naia ds, af ter Gr eek mythology’s f reshwater n ymphs—beautif ul and po werf ul, ancient and ageless, epic and endemic—ea ch linked inextricably to a particular stream or river. Naiads give life and draw life f rom the water. If a r iver is destroyed, so is its naiad. When a waterway changes, mussels are the first to know. They may simply die, or they may live but be unable to lure fish to their offspring. If their reproduction is thwarted for too long, they go extinct. Aquatic ecologists who study freshwater mussels have been sounding alarms f or dec ades. Threatened, endangered, and extinct wail like sirens a cross lists of f reshwater m ussels. As eminent bi ologist and Alabama nativ e E. O. Wilson insists in his f oreword to Freshwater Musse ls of A labama and the Mo bile Basin, “Mussels are not dismissible, even by those who have little interest in the natural world.”

Mussels’ per il is our o wn. We need the same thing— plentiful clean water in health y creeks and r ivers. I think of mussels as I watch the kitchen spigot run. I heed their dwindlings and extinctions as a smoke detector pierc-

8 Immersion

ing the night. Feel alarmed, they insist. Get up and loo k around. The house just might be on fire.  In the spr ing of 2000, while a dr y spell crept steadily toward se vere dr ought, Mike Gangloff crawled thr ough Chewacla Creek finding handfuls of finelined pocketbook mussels. He’d hiked to the creek through woods that sang a high-pitc hed gr een, tr illiums bloo ming in a har mony of white under the trees’ green melody. He’d slipped past eight-f oot-high hurr icane f encing meant to keep hikers from falling into abrupt sinkholes big enough to swal low a six-foot-tall, thick-shouldered graduate student or, as it would happen, an entire creek. As the drought deepened, Gangloff would watch this creek disappear, taking with it scores of mussels—most notably, the threatened finelined pocketbooks.

As a kid f rom Long Island, New York, Gangloff spent childhood f amil y va cations upstate , filling buc kets with frogs and salamanders and attempting to introduce them into swamps near his house, but he always idealized Alabama. Gangloff remembers looking at his P eterson field guides as a kid, fantasizing about the many species in the Southeast. He longed to catch an alligator snapping turtle in an Alabama swamp . Once he lear ned the r egion’s fish and other fauna, it became, for him, the place to be.

Gangloff met freshwater mussels while in Montana getting his master ’s degree and then leapt at an oppor tunity to study mussels at Auburn University, in the epicenter of mussel biodiversity. Few biologists were researching mussels in Alabama, and an A uburn pr of essor ha d r eceived

Breaking Water 9

f ederal f unding thr ough the Endang ered S pecies A ct, specifically for studying mussel populations. Gangloff left Montana winter and arrived in relatively balmy Alabama in January 1999.

Gangloff ’s actual dissertation project f ocused on mussels in the Coosa Riv er system, a dr ainage separate f rom Chewacla Creek. But Chewacla was close to Auburn, so Gangloff could visit it to work on his methods and get to know mussel species without traveling. He wanted to fiddle with population survey techniques in stream sites with both lots of m ussels and v ery f ew. In Che wacla Cr eek, those turned out to be the same sites.Gangloff ’s sampling spots, mussel laden before the drought, would be musselpoor one year later.

In May 2000, Gangloff and crew traipsed upstream beyond the Chewacla State Park boundary, past a spot called Pretty Hole, to one of their study sites.They knelt in gravel beds and rocky cobble—great mussel habitat. Belly down, they snorkeled, except where water was too shallow to submerge their heads. They found and identified ninety-three mussels of seven species. Of those ninety-three mussels, sixty-three were finelined pocketbook mussels. Finelined pocketbooks, Hamiota altilis , are o val-shaped, tawn ycolored mussels the length of a crayon and have thin dark rays spreading f rom hinge to edge like a fan. Recognized as a thr eatened species b y the US g overnment, finelined pocketbook mussels—and their habitat—are protected by the Endang ered S pecies A ct. As Che wacla Cr eek le vels f ell, these mussels would r ise to new inf amy in Auburn, Alabama.

By that summer, about 80 per cent of Che wacla Creek

10 Immersion

had disappeared. L ong runs and r iffles went completely dry. Water persisted o nly in pools, with little flow. The previous t welve mo nths ha d been unusual ly dr y f or the Southeast, and as summer arrived, rainfall remained scarce.

Heat waves hastened evaporation, and the water draining into cr eekbed sinkholes bec ame a cr ucial loss. Gangloff watched Che wacla shr ink, tr acking it with handma de gauges.

He spent a lot of time that seaso n driving in circles in Lee and Ma con Counties, checking his flow-gauge sites like a fur trapline. He’d remembered f rom undergraduate hydrogeology class how to rig a crest gauge with a meter stick, PVC pipe, and a piece of f ence post pounded into stream bottom. Cork shavings floating atop the water inside the pipe lef t their dr egs at the highest pla ce water had r eached in the inter val since Gangloff last wiped it clean. These simple materials, plus this energ etic gr aduate student, c harted Che wacla’s flow like the high-tec h US Geological Survey gauges that log creek levels directly onto a website.

Gangloff ’s gaug es, ho wever, soo n bec ame obsolete .

They couldn’t measur e water disc harge wher e ther e was none. Gangloff stood on a dry creekbed, watching alreadydiminished water pour do wn a sinkhole , leaving almost half a mile of Che wacla Creek with no water in it. That stretch stayed dry for several months.

The finelined pocketbook m ussels w ere dy ing. A f ew surviving f emale m ussels w ere attempting to launc h their larval offspring in shal low pools of water. The f emales packaged the lar vae into bund les called superconglutinates, pigmented to loo k like minno ws. They reeled

Breaking Water 11

out those bund les on a mucoid strand, where the current would normally twitch them, enticing a hungry fish. Tantalized, a fish would strike those bundles, getting—instead of a meal—a faceful of larval mussels, microscopic fingernail shavings shaped like open clamshells.

In Chewacla’s stale pools, those bundles of offspring, instead of dancing in the curr ent, just la y limpl y o n the creek botto m next to the m ussels. “These mussels need Viagra,” Gangloff joked dar kly to his col leagues at the time. They photographed those flaccid mussel lures, an image that later bec ame Exhibit E-24, legally documenting Chewacla’s infirmities for an audience far beyond these biologists. Little did Gangloff know that his photos, mussel counts, and field notes would become evidence in a legal battle within the year.

 Chewacla Creek begins just south of Opelika, Alabama, not f ar f rom the Georgia bor der, gather ing a f ew smal l tributaries. Then the creek spreads behind a dam, forming Lake Ogletr ee. L acking a mec hanism to r egulate water flow, Ogletr ee Dam holds ba ck al l water when the lake level drops below the top, releasing nothing into Chewacla Cr eek. P art co ncrete wal l, par t ear then embank ment, Ogletr ee Dam gathers the cit y of A uburn’s water supply. Just belo w the dam, the cr eekbed suffers f rom a four-wheeler crossing and low flows. Mussels persist in a few pools, but o nly in moder ation. Not far do wnstream, though, the creek recovers.

The next section of Che wacla Creek has r iffles, smal l rocks that cobble the botto m, banks that ar en’t steepl y

12 Immersion

eroded, and beautiful r iver birches and water oaks. It has mussels—a nice piedmont headwater mussel assemblage, including finelined pocketbook mussels.

From this section, the creek flows along Chewacla State Park. Here, the state o wns the cr eek to its mid line. Opposite the state par k sits Mar tin Marietta Materials Inc. From an overlook at the park’s high point, you can see the company’s quarr y yawning, wide and gr ay in the w oods.

This limestone quarry has produced construction aggregate under various owners since the 1920s. Sediment and alkaline water pour thr ough wide pipes, officially c alled “permitted effluent outfalls,” directly into Chewacla Creek.

Even more damaging, midstream fissures and sinkholes, affecting over an a cre of cr eekbed, swallow the cr eek, resulting in seasonal dewatering. Dewatering a creek is like flooding a town, but in reverse; residents that can’t flee to where the y c an br eathe—in this c ase, under water—will die.

In and be yond the state par k, thr ee tr ibutaries enter Chewacla Creek af ter flowing, mostly unheeded b y people, through the cit y of A uburn. Golf courses, cows, in dustry, and m unicipal wastewater trash the water qualit y in Moore’s Mill Creek, Parkerson Mill Creek, and Town Creek, which carry silt and chemicals into Chewacla. The creek is pr etty much dead f or at least half a mile do wnstream of that, according to Mike Gangloff ’s recent studies of those urban tributaries’ effects.

Downstream a few more miles, though, the creek recovers again. Again, there are mussels. This piedmont creek then drops over the fall line, a defining elevation change of about 150 feet, signaling a transition from piedmont to the

Breaking Water 13

coastal plain. Several different mussel species live here, including f ederally endangered ovate clubshell (Pleurobema perovatum) and souther n c lubshell m ussels ( Pleurobema decisum). Here, Chewacla Creek is once again richly alive.

This ability to r ecover, as if f rom a stumble when tripped, defines surviving moder n cr eeks. To r egain a regular gait—with flows, water qualit y, and a cr eek bot tom worthy of m ussels—seems to defy moder n realities.

Astoundingly, a creek can be trapped by a dam, sludged by urban effluent, buffered by quarry outflow, and then, if left alone, can mend itself. A creek can heal if the land around it and under it is healthy and if the water running into it is clean. Like a body—one long, complex organism—a creek can heal over time, seasons, and years after injury has been removed. A creek can also heal o ver distance, as its water travels away from a source of injury. It can heal as long as the creek still has water.

When Chewacla Creek slowed to a tr ickle in 2000, a group of concerned local residents, the Friends of Chewacla Creek, had already begun meeting to tackle grievances with Martin Marietta Materials and the Cit y of Auburn.

The group’s initial aggravation involved a Lee County road that, without community knowledge, was being c losed to the public and designated f or quarry use only, cutting off landowners f rom their most dir ect r oute into to wn, the road they’d driven for years. The road closure, it turned out, fell as a spar k on flammable relationships among people, local government, and business interests regarding natural resources—limestone and water . S o man y ar ticles about the situatio n appeared in the Opelika-Auburn News that the ne wspaper de veloped a log o f or “The Struggle o ver

14 Immersion

Chewacla Creek.” By the summer of 2000, when se vere drought conditions peaked, the ailing creek was in critical condition, and local water politics were ablaze.

Early in the pr ocess, James S prayberry, a w ell-established loc al attor ney, g ot in volved. With their co ncerns unheeded by Martin Marietta Materials, which was actually planning to expand quarr y operations, the Friends of Chewacla Creek sought Sprayberry’s legal help to protect their road and their watershed. Sprayberry remembered fishing and swimming in Chewacla Creek as a c hild. He had seen and hoo ked spoo nbill c atfish, also kno wn as paddlefish, and larg e gar in the cr eek below Lake Ogletree, where fish populations were now limited. Sprayberry and these r esidents knew little about f reshwater mussels but learned quickly upon hearing that Chewacla might be home to mussels protected under the Endangered Species Act. Enter the finelined pocketbooks. Enter the f ederal government.

In February 1999, S prayberry sent a letter to the US Fish and Wildlif e S ervice. The reply inf ormed him that creek g eology was “naturally co nducive to per iodic dr ying,” which would “prohibit formation of mussel colonies in that creek section.”

Unconvinced, S prayberry loo ked else where. He ob tained a 1971 thesis at Auburn University that documented f reshwater m ussels in the troubled section of Che wacla Creek. A nd he w rote letters to the Alabama state m ussel biologist and to Mike Gangloff ’s academic advisor at Auburn University.

In April, Sprayberry got what he needed from the university: a letter detailing the mussel species currently living

Breaking Water 15

in Che wacla Cr eek. It was w ritten b y Gangloff. S prayberry forwarded it to the state mussel biologist, Jeff Garner, inviting his confirmation. By October, the lawyer had waded the creek with Garner to see the finelined pocketbook mussels for himself. In December, Sprayberry sent a letter by certified mail, informing Alabama’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and Department of Environmental Management that if the situatio n was not corr ected in sixt y da ys, he w ould file suit under the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act. “Not only do you represent the people of Alabama, ” he w rote, “but all of the children yet to be born in this State. You are their def enders and pr otectors, here to ensur e c lean water f or countless future generations.” By saving the creek for mussels, they would also be protecting an important source of freshwater for their grandchildren and beyond.

On Januar y 9, 2000, the Opelika-Auburn N ews hea dline r ead, “Controversy F lows thr ough Che wacla,” and within a f ew mo nths, that was the o nly thing flowing.

When Mar tin Mar ietta Mater ials dr agged its f eet o n a dye test to tr ack the disappear ing water, S prayberry and the Friends of Chewacla Creek didn’t delay. They arranged to have fluorescein, a tracer dye, put into the cr eek where it disappear ed into a sinkhole , leaving the cr eekbed dr y.

Sinkholes t ypically f orm when a c avity is cr eated—by water or b y people—in undergr ound r ock, al lowing soil and water to dr op into the v oid. The next day, a Cessna flew over to photograph the quarry pit pond: neon yellow green. “That was the smoking gun r ight there,” Gangloff recalls.

What had begun with a local road-closure dispute now

16 Immersion

involved the Alabama Depar tment of Co nservation and Natural Resources and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Expert scientific witnesses were needed, and one particular gr aduate student ha d just sur veyed Che wacla’s m ussel populations. When Gangloff was summoned, he was ready.

 Eight years later, Andrew and I moved to Opelika, not far from the now-flowing Chewacla Creek where I would see my first wild mussel display. We came f rom far nor th of here, where “heading south” was an expr ession f or things going badly. We dug vig orously into our ne w surroundings, getting acquainted and making our home, starting by digging deep, straight holes into the hard, red clay, fencing the yard for our dog. Watching the iron digging bar clong against the ear th in our ba ckyard, I expected the c lay to bleed, and it did. Like our palms af ter a day of shoveling, the fence-post holes’ raw interiors radiated red. Three feet deep, they looked hot and moist, fleshy. The landscape here seemed visceral, as if dominated by gut instinct and heat.

One af ternoon, r ushed and not watc hing my f eet through a shr ubby section, I stepped str aight into one of those postholes. I lurched from upright walking to sprawling thigh-deep in the hole. Stunned and bruised, I paused while my entire left leg felt the surprising coolness of our yard’s underworld. The roots of trees and rocklike chunks pressed my flesh. My first plunge into Alabama ’s land scape.

Three y ears later , stil l f eeling like ne wcomers to the South, we reveled in f ecundity. Sam, who ha d joined me

Breaking Water 17

inside the wet suit, now joined Andrew in our garden. That summer, Andrew managed to gr ow enormous sweet potatoes. A t S eptember har vest, the y w ere the siz e of our daughter, Stella, who had arrived in June. The crisp, orange flesh of one potato alone made two sweet potato pies and enough f ries to f eed f our adults and a toddler. Andrew grew them in the red dirt of our front yard, in a patch encircling the shorn tuft of a once-giant forsythia bush. The sweet potatoes wove their handsome dark vines across the downslope side of the bush. Opposite them, watermelon vines sprawled like teenagers, parading their juicy globes.

We ate the glowing sweetness captured from this soil.

It was June of that year, when garden beds bulged with mounds of young vines, and I still bulged with Stella, that we r eturned to Che wacla Cr eek. Again w e enter ed the creek beside a bridge—a different bridge than where I had snorkeled with Sam in utero. Beer cans and old tires decorated our entr y point. The air tasted like mud. This time we didn’t need wet suits. This time we were searching for a sandy shoal to cool ourselves, not only for mussels.

Waddling downhill to the creek, I remembered first noticing Andrew and how comfortable he had seemed in his body, sprawling across my col lege-room floor, elbows propping his torso o ver an organic c hemistry noteboo k.

He did not focus on looking intellectual but on being alive, doing the work. This was a quality I still admired fourteen years later, as Andrew balanced Sam on his lef t hip and reached upslope for my hand. I looked hard in the direction of my hidden f eet and too k his hand. Together, we steadied my body on the steep bank, an obstacle course of mud and rocks.

18 Immersion

I f ollowed Andrew as he stepped into the cr eek, calfdeep and muddy. We shuffled a few steps deeper, and then something burst from the underbrush just beside us—the rattle of weeds, the hiss of water. My mind flashed—water moccasin—and electr icity shot do wn my ar ms, g ouging my fingers into Andrew’s palm. We stood for several moments, looking around, and saw only water.

Pondering m ussels and water was not my job . As an emergency veterinarian, I treated dogs and cats for conditions such as snakebites, but I ha d no official reason f or traipsing into creeks. That day, rooted in Chewacla Creek, only the mud seeped into my open sandals. Finding myself, again, thigh-deep in Alabama, I f elt an in vitation to be alive. I could choose to leave the creek, fleeing immediate dangers like water moccasins. Or I could stay, banking this type of experience as savings in case of future poverty of freshwater, as a buffer against the more distant but still very r eal dang er of r aising kids in a co mmunity of dr y rivers, where creatures like mussels have gone extinct, unnoticed.

We might regret bringing our kids out here. Decisions made under heat and pr essure do n’t al ways sur vive later scrutiny, or they can harden and gain value like the limestone the quarry desired, deep underneath this creek, turning to marble under the weight of time. I decided to sta y in the cr eek. We could manag e the dang er of a snake at our ankles, if somehow taking our kids to the creek would provide some connection, some ingredient toward a cure for a dry future. We would keep our eyes open. We would immerse ourselves.

We later p hotographed a water mocc asin dr aped in

Breaking Water 19

forearm-thick loops over a branch. This snake ignored us as we wallowed in a c lear shoal, waist-deep o n Sam and paved with br ight sand and pebbles. Here, the cr eek was wide enough for Sam to stagger around, splashing, herded away f rom banks and o verhanging tr ees. Her e, the air tasted fresh, and sunlight dappled the creek. I sat, cooling the furnace of my large belly. A f ew thin, complex layers separated the creek soaking my abdo men f rom the water bathing my c hild. We were not that different—my child, those layers of my body, the creek, the mussels—all of us relying on transformation to survive, developing new ways of breathing, eating, and perceiving the world. I soaked in the knowledge that nearby, pregnant mussels—little spectaclecase, finelined pocketbook, bluefer, Alabama orb, elephant ear, southern fatmucket—were ready to release their offspring into this same water . Here, f reshwater mussels filtered water thr ough their fine gills, trapping sediment, bringing clarity.

 What br ings that taste in y our mouth like an underr ipe blackberry, bitter and gritty, lingering? A snake at your ankle, a dr y water suppl y, the dy ing animals of y our lif e’s work? In bringing our c hildren into creeks—despite immediate dang ers—we hoped to spar k their co nnection with f reshwater and its inhabitants, while w e could. To keep all of us tuned to what we need for survival and to remind us to pr otect the water and the div erse creatures it houses. Empathy f or mussels propelled us to step into the creek.

Mike Gangloff felt this same co nnection; it sent him

20 Immersion

back to the creek and into a room full of lawyers to testify on behalf of that creek and its mussels. He remembers the experience of being deposed as far worse than defending his disser tation. On Thursday morning, April 5, 2001, he took a shower and dressed respectably, despite his general irreverence at the time. He drove to James Sprayberry’s office in Auburn. Four lawyers awaited him in a conference room. When he arrived, they took everything he brought, including his legal pad with a page of notes to himself, his gathered thoughts. They photocopied the notes and held his photographs f or examination during the questio ning.

Gangloff swore to speak the tr uth, the whole tr uth, and nothing but the truth. They began.

Dorman Walker introduced himself as a lawyer for one of the defendants, Martin Marietta Materials. He did not explain that his employer was an expansive corporate law firm r epresenting man y c lients, inc luding agr ibusiness, construction, industry, and power producers, ranging from small businesses to multinational corporations. But Gangloff already knew that.

Walker opened b y questio ning Gangloff ’s educ ation, asking him about his research and his résumé, which was Exhibit E-14.

Besides Walker, five other lawyers sat in the room. James Byram was Walker’s associate , also def ending Mar tin Marietta Materials. The lawyers for each of the other defendants—private landowners and the Alabama Depar tment of Conservation and Natural Resources—remained silent until their br ief cross-examinations. The plaintiff ’s lawyers were James Sprayberry of Auburn, who provided his office space f or the depositio n, and Char les “Chip”

Breaking Water 21

Vercelli of Alabama En vironmental L aw, who pr ovided intermittent objections to Walker’s questions.

Some rapport balanced the tensio n among these men, and at one point Walker joked, “The only thing I know about mussels is they taste good.”

“Not these mussels,” Gangloff said.

“Have you tasted one before?” Byram asked Gangloff.

“I have not, but everyone that I’ve talked to who has had them said they’re pretty awful. They live so long,” Gangloff said.

“The Indians ate them, didn’t they?” Walker said, demonstrating that he’d done some reading after all, and that he didn’t always use culturally sensitive language.

Byram spo ke o nly a f ew other times, inc luding o ne instance when Gangloff flustered Walker by referring to water temperature in degrees centigrade.

“Are you just determined to use measurements that none of us use here?” Walker asked Gangloff.

“He’s a scientist, Dorman,” said Byram, and after some brief clarifications, Walker proceeded with his questions.

Overall, however, Walker wasn’t easily flustered, nor was he joking. He pic ked apar t both of Gangloff ’s letters to James Sprayberry that reported mussel inf ormation. The first letter, dated A pril 1999, had confirmed S prayberry’s suspicions that m ussels did indeed exist in the disputed section of Che wacla Cr eek. The letter ended, Walker pointed out, with Gangloff prescribing a thor ough sur vey of the creek, to better understand how human activity was influencing mussel populations. Since the letter, such a survey had been performed—by Gangloff.

Walker pr ompted Gangloff to identify human activi-

22 Immersion

ties affecting the m ussels. Gangloff said he believed that development of the Chewacla Creek watershed, the Lake Ogletree dam, and quarry activities were the three big ones c hanging loc al h ydrology. As the questio ning pr oceeded, Walker pointed to other factors affecting mussels: drought, stress from scientists handling them, and a report from one of the defense’s scientists citing the ATV crossing, mussel predators, and—strangely—algal mats as the prime culprits causing mussel mortality.

Point by point, Walker also scrutinized Gangloff ’s second letter to S prayberry, dated Januar y 2001. This letter described Gangloff ’s crest-gauge flow data o ver the past five hundr ed da ys and his sy stematic sur vey of Che wacla Creek mussels. Gangloff documented severely altered natural water flows and the m ussel populatio ns at r isk.

These letters were not, str ictly speaking , Gangloff ’s job; his dissertation requirements did not extend to protecting imperiled fauna in local watersheds. He was there simply to do science.

Walker’s job was to po ke at the science , c hecking f or leaks, hoping to sink it. He latched onto Gangloff ’s words, trying to squee ze usef ul meanings f rom them. When Gangloff described so me of his assessments as “qualitative,” Walker pounced.

“Would it be fair to say you eyeballed it?” Walker asked.

“I mean, is that a loosely equivalent term?”

“I wouldn’t say eyeballed it.”

“Okay.”

“That sounds a little less rigorous than what I a ctually do.”

Breaking Water 23

“Then what do you do? Ma ybe that ’s the best wa y to ask you.”

Gangloff took a deep breath. “When I go out there, I’ll first look around in places where shell material is likely to be deposited, in gravel bars and on the banks. And then I will go to places in the stream channel using a view bucket for visually inspecting the stream bottom and looking for live filtering animals. Occasionally, I will do what ’s called raccooning, where you stic k your hands in the m ud and run your fingers around there and you can generally find them, you know, reach up under, flip over rocks, look under logs, look in all of those good places that you’re apt to find mussels and snakes. We see a lot of snakes.”

“I’m sur e y ou do,” Walker said, loo king at Gangloff ’s notes f or mor e amm unition. “You c haracterize the ar ea below the outflow f rom the quarry as silty and nasty?” he continued, skimming w ords f rom Gangloff ’s field notebook.

“Yes.” “Now, is that based on a chemical analysis of the water?”

“No, it’s not. It’s just, again, a really qualitative observation,” Gangloff sighed. “There was embedded rock, a lot of silt, rock flour in the water.”

“Okay. Well, I agree with you that there could be some silt there, but I’m not sure what the nasty means?”

“Well, y ou kno w, these ar e my perso nal notes. S o…”

Gangloff seemed tempted to say more, but paused.

“Well, I’m just tr ying to figure out what y ou meant by nasty,” Walker said. He had, during the four hours in that room, quizz ed Gangloff on his study methods, his abil -

24 Immersion

ity to correctly identify mussels, his flow gauges, his opinions on work by other biologists, and his understanding of mussel biology. Gangloff was glad he’d recently completed comprehensive oral exams for his PhD, as preparation for this examination. Now he had to explain his field notes.

In so me wa ys, no ne of this pr odding and sparr ing seemed to matter. The mussel population had already suff ered. The creek, r iddled with sinkholes and suc ked to a trickle, seemed mortally damaged. It was an object to pity, no longer a vibrant piedmont stream. It was the victim of an offender who r emained innocent until pr oven guilt y.

And guilt kept dar ting ar ound definitions of w ords like qualitative and nasty. The burden of pr oof la y o n Gangloff—to prove that he knew mussels, that the stream was not flowing, that the federally protected mussels were damaged, and that the limesto ne quarry had anything to do with it. He was a biologist, however, not a lawyer, and he simply stated what he had observed and tested. To him, the facts seemed to speak for themselves.

Near the end, Walker asked Gangloff if he had documented a decline in the finelined pocketbook mussel population during his study.

“Not right now,” Gangloff said. “But when we resurvey the sites this summer, we should be able to make an estimate of that.”

“I hope you will take into a ccount how harassed those mussels have been between now and then. A lot of people have been picking them up,” said Walker, emphasizing his concern for how scientists had mishandled the mussels.

“I hope you will do it before the trial of this case, which is July 9th,” said Chip Vercelli.

Breaking Water 25

“We’re planning o n it, ” Gangloff said. He co mplimented the lawy ers on their g ood questions and in vited them to attend his dissertation defense, the final hurdle to complete his PhD. Surveying Che wacla Cr eek ear ly that summer , Gangloff found huge mussel kills, far beyond any normal fluctuation. The study site where he had counted ninety-three total m ussels in the spr ing of 2000 y ielded o nly t welve mussels in 2001.He found only five finelined pocketbooks where he ’d last counted sixt y-nine. This was a dramatic and—if someone were at fault—illegal decimation of this f ederally threatened species. “There’s a lot of bedr ock in that section,” Gangloff tells me. “The animals didn’t have much of a refuge. So they just cooked.”

 The future of Chewacla Creek and its mussels was not, in the end, determined in a cour troom. And although f ederally listed species died in larg e numbers, nobody paid any fines. As part of a settlement, the landowners, primarily the quarr y and the cit y, worked with the US F ish and Wildlife Service to apply for a Safe Harbor Agreement.

A Safe Harbor Agreement is one option for landowners who have threatened or endangered species on their property. It ’s o ne of m ultiple appr oaches to pr otecting listed species in a more cooperative, less litigious manner. Under a Safe Harbor Agreement, the landowner promises to take specified actions to impr ove or pr otect habitat f or listed species. If the lando wner co mpletes those a ctions, the owner will only be held responsible for “take”—defined as disruption or har m to pr otected species—that dr ops the

26 Immersion

animals below the baseline or or iginally counted number on the property. If the property protects a species’ habitat, the landowner will have safe harbor from penalties for incidentally harming the species.

Chewacla Cr eek’s S af e Har bor Agr eement, signed in 2003, made history. It was the first such agreement created for f reshwater mussels since the Endangered Species Act was signed in 1973. The agreement bound the quarr y, f or the next thirty years, to fill subsidence features—pour concrete into cracks and sinkholes—and to pump water from the quarry pit into Lake Ogletree to help ensure adequate water in the lake. The City of Auburn was required to install a siphon to shunt water o ver the dam f rom the lake to the creek. The Safe Harbor Agreement also insisted on annual monitoring of mussel populations.

However, official mussel sur veys within the cit y and quarry pr operty lines y ielded a S af e Har bor Agr eement baseline number of o ne. Onl y o ne finelined pocketbook was found precisely on city property, just below the dam.

Although mor e of them could be f ound f ar ther do wnstream, the cit y and the quarr y w ould o nly, tec hnically, be held r esponsible f or o ne m ussel. A nnual mo nitoring would be slightly dubious, performed by a well-meaning, contracted a quatic biologist with little ba ckground in mussels and a lo ngtime w orking r elationship with the City of Auburn.

Chewacla Cr eek il lustrates c lassic insults to a water shed. It offers a pr ototype of the r elationships bet ween a co mmunity and the cr eek or r iver ser ving as its water supply and wastewater receiver. The Chewacla Creek conflicts are t ypical of man y situatio ns ready to co mbust as

Breaking Water 27

we abuse watersheds without f oresight. This story also demonstrates f reshwater mussels’ position at the fulcr um of these issues. Friends of Chewacla Creek founder Mary Lou Smith, an Auburn native who r eflects on the whole legal experience as a nightmare, feels personal fondness for the finelined pocketbook. “There should be a statue put up somewhere f or that little m ussel, because it r eally got everybody’s attention,” she tel ls me. “It may not ’ve saved itself, but it did save the creek.” Smith’s admiration for the finelined pocketbook was well placed, but her co nclusion was only partly correct. The health of Chewacla Creek and its mussels was not entir ely secured, but the m ussels had riveted the city’s attention, at least for a time, on how the creek was doing.

Where does your water come f rom? Is there lif e in it?

Many residents of Auburn and Opelika—myself included, initially—did not kno w anything about f reshwater mussels or their o wn water suppl y. Creeks seemed ignor able.

What will creeks and rivers look like a f ew decades f rom now? Will the y suppor t lif e? F reshwater m ussels, silent and exquisite, live at the root of these questions. Answers are as endemic as m ussels—specific to river and pla ce and people. Mussels link land and water , so understand ing their lives requires knowledge about water flow, water quality, and the character of the riverbed itself. Every creek and river has its stor ies, and man y of these ar e bound to freshwater mussels.

For Auburn, as f or many places, the cr eek holds loc al stories, hosts r ecreation, and boasts a mind-expanding parallel univ erse of under water lif e—a w ealth of cr eatures and plants, making the whole sy stem health y and

28 Immersion

beautiful. When mussels draw our attention to creeks and rivers, we access a w ealth of insights. Here is a gif t f rom mussels—an in vitation. Co me, loo k deeper, the m ussels beckon to us. There is a whole w orld under our water ’s surface, and you are part of it.

www.islandpress.org Phone: (202) 232-7933 Fax: (202) 234-1328 Island Press 2000 M Street NW Suite 650 Washington, DC 20036

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Immersion

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reshwater mussels have a way of inspiring unusual devotion. Immersion: The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels is a deep dive into the world of these important

creatures. In it, veterinarian and award-winning writer Abbie Gascho Landis explores the hidden lives of mussels in our rivers and streams—and asks whether our capacity to love these alien creatures can power us to protect freshwater for humans and nature alike.

In turns joyful and sobering, Immersion is an invitation to see

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rivers from a mussel’s perspective, a celebration of the wild lives visible to those who learn to search.

Abbie Gascho Landis

A

bbie Gascho Landis is a writer and veterinarian whose work has been published in Pinchpenny Press, Full Grown People, and Paste Magazine.

She has won Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies 2015 Essay Award and

an Arthur DeLong Writing Award and was a finalist for the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award. Landis has a bachelor’s degree in English and biology from Goshen College and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from The Ohio State University.

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Phone: 202.232.7933 Fax: 202.234.1328 Island Press 2000 M Street NW Suite 650 Washington, DC 20036