One man's quest for a rare shellfish

KCUR's Up From Dust is supported by FarmTender, an online platform connecting regenerative farmers with landowners who share stewardship goals. The site supports mentorship, land access, and sustainable farming practices. Learn more at farmtender.us. That's farmtender.us. This is the first time Candice City will hold a global sporting event of massive scale with 650,000 expected visitors. Don't get lost in the crowd because we're Midwest nice KCUR made it easier to jump on the International Football Bandwagon. Welcome to Soccer City 26, one handy email that helps you keep track of all things game related in KC. Sign up now at ksur.org/sucker. That's ksur.org/sucker. Have you ever gone grubbing in a river? That's what Trevor Stark's is up to. He's on his hands and knees in about two feet of water, groping around, looking for something about the size of a ping pong ball. I know there's 600 of them right in this area. He's hoping to find one specific species of fresh water muscle on the river bottom. You know that there are 600 neo-show muckets here and you are now just wandering around feeling and the dark basically trying to pull one up by luck. Yeah pretty much. We're just kind of a blindly search around. If you've ever seen a raccoon foraging looking around for for crayfish, it's exactly what I'm doing right now. It is kind of amusing to watch and Trevor knows it. You know with fisheries sampling you have all the specialized equipment, you look legitimate, you look like you know what you're doing. With muscles sometimes you just look like you're playing in the water. But there is a certain skill to this that comes with experience. You know when you first get in the water you're just going to be pulling up every other rock and going is this a muscle? Is this a muscle? If you haven't seen a muscle before it's a lot like a clam so you can see how it would be easy to confuse with a rock while groping around in the water. But Trevor's gotten really good at feeling out the actual muscles. Hey welcome to the neo-show river by the way. We're about 60 miles south of Topeka. Trevor is a biologist and works for the state, the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks. And we went out in the spring. About eight months after he and some colleagues had released more than 600 young neo-show muckets right in this very spot. Now he's got to figure out if any of them are still alive. That's a pistol grip. And he is definitely finding muscles. That's a monkey face. You are pulling one up like every few seconds you are pulling up a muscle. But they're all other species. No neo-show mucket. So why care if any of the 600 rare muscles that were released here survived? Why so much fuss about one specific little mullisk that happens to be endangered? Well, it's not really just about one mullisk. Kansas has a plan to rebuild populations of different animals in rivers and streams. The neo-show mucket is one of them. The plan is pretty cool. So hang tight. I will get to that later. First though, we got to get into the why. If some species are disappearing from today's modern world, can we really do anything about it? And are they really that big a deal? Well, we'll use muscles as an example. Muscles have a super power. Sucking water in and spitting it back out. In other words, filtering the water. That's exactly what they're doing. We'll have an incurrent siphon and an ex-current siphon. Now picture a river in the Midwest with healthy muscle beds all along it. Beds that have thousands or tens of thousands of muscles each. And every one of those little animals is spending all day long doing this cleanup duty. You have all these muscles out here filtering gallons and gallons of water and they're taking bacteria, excess nutrients. So when you say nutrients, you mean phosphorus and nitrogen? Primarily, yes. So that's stuff from like farm fertilizer and manure. I mean, stuff that is a headache for our water utilities. Utilities have to treat it out of the water before piping it to your home. But river muscles remove a lot of it for free. If you took every muscle out of this river and went and visited water treatment facilities along the Nioh Show River, I'd imagine that water treatment would get a lot more expensive if you didn't have muscles in the water. And yes, there are still muscles in the Nioh Show River today, but not nearly as many as they're used to be and not all the kinds that they're used to be. Like the Nioh Show Muckets that Kansas is trying to reestablish by releasing them, the last known evidence of them living in this river was back in the 1990s. This is happening all across the country, different animals disappearing from different areas because of us. It's called local extirpation when a species vanishes from an area. And because those animals were doing something in the place they disappeared from, like depending on the species cleaning the water or dispersing plant seeds or eating carcasses, each local extirpation means that area is losing a puzzle piece. At some point we lose enough species and the ecosystem goods and services, water filtration, clean air, clean water, pollination, all those things that intact environments do for us. We could lose that. That's why Trevor and his colleagues are so keen to reestablish Nioh Show Muckets at this spot. What we're trying to do here is restore a cog, a piece of this machine, of the ecosystem back to its place. Nioh Show Muckets have in fact disappeared from most of their range, and in 2013 the federal government put them on its endangered species list. So right now it's endangered. There's a certain threshold we have to make to downlist it from endangered to threatened, and then maybe someday the real hope is to de-list it completely. From the Kansas News Service, and KCOR Studios, you're listening to Up From Dust. I'm Celia Yopis-Jepsen. Over the decades, over hunting, pollution, and dams have hit many of the animals in our Midwest and Great Plains River's heart. Some died off from stretches of water or from whole river systems, and as their world shrinks, they're ultimately at greater risk of extinction. Depending on your point of view, they deserve to be there because they're amazing creatures that belong in the complex, beautiful landscapes we live in. Or in a more utilitarian view, well, their loss is our loss, creating ecosystem gaps that could get worse and worse. But Midwest scientists see a chance to reverse the trend for some animals. Kansas hopes to do it with 21 emparalled river species, muscles, fish, turtles. Because there are waterways where pollution and other problems have improved to the point that it might work to reintroduce them to the places that were once their homes. Okay, we will get back to Trevor's quest to find some of those little endangered muscles he had released months earlier. But first, there's no way I'm doing an episode on the under-appreciated freshwater muscles of the Midwest without telling you how they reintroduce. Because one, it is cool, and two, it is going to be relevant in a bit. When Trevor first learned about the reproduction, his reaction was, "Uh, that how are they still? I've like, it just seems so specialized, but it obviously works." Picture a muscle. It's a female, she's just chilling on the riverbed, and she's got a fishing lure that looks just like a minnow, and I mean just like it. It's dangling from her shell, "and they will flap it in the current." Till, say, a hungry bath lunges for a bite of that "minnow." And that's when they shoot their glokidia up on the fish. Fould, that bath gets nothing to eat. Instead, the muscle squirts a small army of glokidia, tiny muscle babies right in its face. And I would encourage you to check out their some YouTube videos. I will link to videos in the show notes. The footage is amazing. They actually attach to the fish's gill or the outside of its skin. These babies look like 80-bitty Pac-Man that clamp down and hang tight. And in some species, they hit your ride the whole winter. Upstream, downstream, this way they can go anywhere. This ultra-convincing minnow lure is actually just one muscle trick. Different species each have their own tricks. Some species, they will actually shoot out these little packets that look like Mayfly larvae. So it sticks to a rock or sticks to vegetation. And when a hungry fish finds that tasty Mayfly snack, it explodes and there's, you know, 100 to 200 glokidia in there. Boom, another fooled fish. Freshwater Mussels, man, their whole business model depends on gullible fish. It's not uncommon in the spring. We could go net some fish out of that ruffle downstream and take a look at their gills and you'd see tiny little white or black dots on their gills. And those are baby muscles. Just wait and fall off. But our clever river muscles don't just use these fish. They need them. No host fish around, their babies will die. What's more, it has to be the right fish. different muscle species evolved to hitchhike on different fish species and the link can be really specific. Meaning one fish species has to come up to this muscle. Or else that mama has no hope of producing a next generation. The typical Midwest River today is like the Neo Show River. Like I said, it doesn't have nearly as many muscles as it used to or as many kinds. Go back 150 years ago and compare to then there used to be these super impressive muscle beds just all over the place. Yes, you read some of the old muscle literature and they talk about some of these beds where you couldn't take a step without stepping on muscles. Like there was more muscle than there was grapple almost. But we've been putting these wonderful quirky creatures through a world of hurt in Kansas. Eight species have now disappeared. Forty remain but more than half of those 40 species are suffering to the point that they've now all been given varying levels of state or federal protections. So what happened? How do we get here? Well, let's start in the late 1800s with muscle harvesting. Which was actually a huge industry in Southeast Kansas. Try to imagine this. People took an estimated 85 million muscles out of just the Neo Show River in just one year, one river one year. Now think about this. This muscle harvesting industry was going on across the Midwest on lots of rivers for lots of years. The sheer number of muscles that we killed is hard to fathom. There are old black and white photos of just huge heaps of muscle shells piled outside factories for the pearl button industry. So buttons on shirts, knife handles, comb handles, they were using the maker of the shell for that. The maker is the iridescent coating? Yes. Yes. So mother of pearl, there was an incredible demand for it in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And then later in the second half of the 1900s, another industry started buying up river muscles, the international cultured pearl industry. Because it turned out you could take freshwater muscle shells, cut them up, put the little bits into oysters and voila, effectively trick the oysters into making pearls. Okay, now let's add a totally different problem into the mix. All the damn creation that happened in the early 1900s. Damn. And what I'm going to describe here is very common all over the country. We build dams and we build them for large reservoirs and we build small kind of run of the river dams where a lot of towns have their water intakes. Damns can be super useful from the human perspective. Obviously, like for water utilities to pull our drinking water, but throwing up literal walls, obviously divides rivers into segments. In the past, animals used to be able to move in between. Well, now they can't. If you've seen the size of John Redmond Dam, you know that a fish in a muscle, it isn't moving over that anymore. John Redmond is a great big dam on the Neo Show River. Okay, so far we've learned about muscle harvest and dams. And then you have pollution thrown on top of that. And that's kind of been the downfall of muscles. Especially before we passed federal legislation in the 70s to regulate water pollution. You had really, really bad pollution events. So this is sewage, this is oil refinery outputs. And so large numbers of muscles would die. In the past, if a muscle bed got wiped out, that spot would probably be able to be recolonized from another part of the river. Because remember, baby muscles could come back from somewhere else by hitchhiking on fish. But now that we have these dams, that can't happen anymore. Or sometimes the muscle may be survived in a stretch of river, but the host fish disappeared. And then dams block the fish from returning. So the muscle can't reproduce and ultimately disappears there too. It's just kind of a long drawn out micro extinction going on in different stretches of the river. Which is why wildlife biologists with help from a federal hatchery are bringing in young Neo Show Muckets to spots like where I'm standing with Trevor. These muscles will never be back here without human intervention. Stick with us. We will be back in a minute. [Music] In just a few short years, Casey Current Fever has swept Kansas City. And the team's still color has taken over the town. When you see someone else, that's a Casey Current fan. You're like, "Oh, like you're a legit Kansas City fan." But women's soccer hasn't always enjoyed the support it does today. For the blue crew, there were games over there of four of us. There. So we did our best but you know, it wasn't a lot. How Kansas City became a women's soccer town on the latest episode of the People's History of Kansas City. Okay, the way state biologists see it, the time is ripe to put back some puzzle pieces that have gone missing from our rivers. Here's Trevor again. So we think there are conditions that have gotten better in certain stretches of the river that can sustain some of these animals that were taken out. Why? Well for one, the mother of pearl industry that we mentioned, like for making clothing buttons out of shells, it's long gone here. The rise of plastic replaced that use by the 1940s. Also one of the few instances where the invention of plastic really helped the, helped the environment out in that case. So it became a lot more cost-effective to make a button out of plastic than punching one out of a, out of a muscle shell. And as for the effects of the cultured oyster pearl industry on muscles here, well that went on much longer. I will link to a great guide to muscles written by Kansas scientists. And they say that as recently as the 1990s, Kansas exported more than two million pounds of muscles. But in 2003, Kansas finally put the kibosh on selling muscles. It's now been more than two decades without any commercial harvest. One more big change, water quality. The 1972 Clean Water Act that we've talked about before stopped communities and factories from dumping untreated raw sewage and chemicals into rivers. We've still got plenty of pollution problems. Don't get me wrong. But a lot of rivers vastly improved. So all these changes together mean it is time to restock some species. Only it is not actually that straightforward. I believe it's somewhere like 97-98% of land in Kansas is privately held. So we're not going to be able to make a difference at a population level without getting private landowners involved. Right. Kansas specifically is heavily privately owned compared to other states that have comparatively loads of public land. So Trevor and his colleagues need access to private land. They need permission. But landowners do not like endangered species. I'm generalizing, but it is a thing. They have a really negative connotation with an endangered species. Here's why. Federal and state rules come into play if a rare species is on your property. Those rules are meant of course to protect the species. But that doesn't change the fact that landowners are often scared of the liability. And they're not likely to say yes if the state comes knocking, asking to release rare animals. So this is where Kansas and the US Fish and Wildlife Service change their tack. And Kansas becomes the first state with a new program that makes it easier to win over help from landowners for a bunch of species statewide. Here's how it works. Trevor and his colleagues find good places to release animals and then landowners who say yes to any of these 21 aquatic species. So 10 fish, 10 mussels, and then the alligator snapping turtle. Get legal protections if an animal gets hurt by accident on their property. Have you found that landowners are hesitant? I would say I was apprehensive about it going up to a farmer and slapping a agreement on their desk and saying, hey, do you want to sign an agreement with the federal government and let us put endangered species on here? I was I was really skeptical that that was going to work, but I haven't been told no once. If you sat down with the landowner and explained what you want to do and be completely transparent and answer all their questions, like I haven't had anyone say no. Now knock on wood like that time's probably coming at some point, but it's been really really positive. Some farmers and others end up pretty excited about these animals and about helping out. Once they're no longer worried that they could get into trouble by say accidentally hurting a mussel bed while doing anti erosion work along a stream or something like that. The interesting thing is there are probably aren't too many things that a landowner like out this property could do where you would wipe out a whole bed, but that agreement is there for peace of mind. So far, Kansas has nearly 20 agreements in place with landowners to release imperiled mussels, fish or turtles on their properties. Where you were the first state in the nation to have a state-wide programmatic agreement like this, North Carolina since past one and I'm assuming other states are going to probably pursue this avenue for doing endangered species reintroductions. And Trevor says North Carolina deserves big credit here. They actually came up with this idea. Kansas just ended up getting it off the ground faster. Okay, back to Trevor's task at hand here in the Nioh Show River, his eager search to prove that any of the 600 Nioh Show Muckets released in the spot are indeed still alive and kicking. I know, I've kept you waiting. So I watched Trevor grubbing for maybe an hour and a half and he doesn't pull up a Nioh Show Mucket. So there's a pimple bag? Yeah, it's got pimples, but he does find a dozen different species, which is cool. So that's another plain pocketbook. And he's actually got some pretty silvers and blues on him. And this one's a butterfly, it kind of looks like a butterfly wing. They get these kind of pencil lines and chevrons on them and that's actually a state-threatened species. Side note, did you know there are football-sized muscles in our rivers? I did not. And this is actually the most washboards I've ever seen in one site. That's the biggest species in the state. But without finding some of those 600 ping pong-sized Nioh Show Muckets that were released here eight months earlier, biologists could have a problem. If none survived, maybe there's some reason they can't make it here. And if that's true, well, some biologists would recommend moving on. There's probably other habitats that you won't have to be fighting some unknown stressor. But Trevor's not feeling down about it yet. He calls it a day and just plans to bring more people with him next time, more hands on deck, to search this riverbed. Because all those little living ping pong balls could absolutely still be here. And Trevor is feeling good about the chances that they are. Which honestly makes me feel good about it too. So I figure next time I visit, I will hopefully get to see a real live Nioh Show Mucket. And that's pretty darn cool. A pack up all my equipment, turn off my audio recorder to way back across the stream to my car. Then suddenly, this is like the rule of radio reporting. As soon as I turn off my recorder, okay, what just happened? Right by the bucket where we started is a live Nioh Show Mucket that we stalked last year. We literally searched all over and we had walked right past one where you put your bucket down. It's chocolate brown, unassuming, with a little tattoo on it that proves it's from the federal hatchery. How do you feel? I'm pretty excited about this because this animal is alive. Even though it's only one, this is a box checked. We'll come back and look for more. It is reassuring. An initial signal that this is in fact a stretch of river where the released muscles may have a shot of making it long term. And if that's the case, then state biologists will keep coming back, stalking hundreds of muscles each year for like five years and each year grubbing in the water to check on them. This is the most exciting, rewarding part of the job. And to me, here's the really exciting part. These muscles are two years old when Kansas releases them, which is almost old enough to have their own muscle babies. The folks at the hatchery tell me that these get sexually mature at age three. Someday, in the not-so-distant future, Trevor and his colleagues could even start finding neoshell muckets that aren't engraved with little hatchery tattoos. Born here in a river where no one had seen one alive in 30 years. So if we find a little one that doesn't have a tattoo on the outside of the shell, they're reproducing and that's kind of the big, that's the big long end game is to find a self-sustaining population here again. That's the dream. Yes, that's the dream. That's the most step. Up from dust is a production of KCOR Studios and the Kansas News Service. This episode was reported, written and mixed by me, Celia Yopis-Jepsen. My editors are Mackenzie Martin and Steven Caranta. To hurt the word "neosho" a lot today, there's a river, a muscle, a city, and more all with that name. This name comes from the Osage, who lived across what's now Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. They faced forced displacement in the 1800s and today the Osage Nation is based in Northeast Oklahoma. Music, provided by David Condos, Tom Lonnie, Milktooth, and Blue Dot Sessions, big thanks to freshwater muscles superstar Ed Miller for patiently answering questions for this story, and to Andrew Rudder, director of the Baker University Wetlands and Discovery Center, and to KCOR's Gabe Rosenberg and Jacob Smollin. The great plains nature center pocket guide to Kansas freshwater muscles was very helpful for this episode. You can find it online if you want to start nerding out about muscles next time you are walking along a river. Guys, we are not done with this topic. This is our worth a bit of muscle mania. So next time on Up From Dust, we are going to another river, and we will see how environmental progress can be complicated. Two steps forward, one step back. Till next time, thanks for listening.