The Golden Riffleshell’s Appalachian Roadtrip
The emergency surgery took place in the back of a modified pickup truck in a McDonald’s parking lot in Pikeville, Ky. This scrappy plan to rescue a species of mussel on the edge of extinction made perfect sense: Meet somewhere between Indian Creek in Virginia, where the last known wild golden riffleshells lived, and Kentucky’s Center for Mollusk Conservation in Frankfort, where they would be saved.
The strategy was a malacologist’s version of a Hail Mary pass. One scientist would gingerly pry open three golden riffleshells and remove their larvae to be nurtured in his lab. The other would return the three mussels to Indian Creek, and wait for the day he could introduce their grown offspring to the same habitat. If the plan didn’t produce enough offspring to sustain a new population, the mussels would probably vanish.
Five years ago, Indian Creek was the only known remaining habitat for the golden riffleshell (Epioblasma florentina aureola). And like many other mussels, this bivalve’s future looked bleak. Biologists estimated that only about 100 remained in the wild. “They were the next species on the list for disappearing from the face of the Earth,” says biologist Tim Lane, who leads mussel recovery efforts at the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources’ Aquatic Wildlife Conservation Center, near Marion. “We were literally watching the last of them.”
Seeing a species vanish in real time is difficult, he says, and is in some ways worsened by the mussels’ near-invisibility beneath the surface. “They’re not charismatic like, say, the northern white rhino,” he says. When mussels go extinct, almost no one knows — or mourns them.