Full interview text

Stacy: You’re listening to the VMO show. I’m your guest host Stacy Harbaugh. You may recognize my voice from Polka Time with DJ Shotski on Sunday and Saturday nights at 7 p.m. on WVMO. But for my day job, I work for River Alliance of Wisconsin where we advocate for the protection of Wisconsin’s clean water resources. Now, I meet the coolest water experts in my work. And today’s VMO show guest is one of the best examples of charismatic and dedicated scientists we’re blessed to have in Wisconsin. I’m joined today by Lisie Kitchel, who works in the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation. Lisie trained as an aquatic ecologist and spends most of her time working with native mussels throughout the lakes, rivers, and streams of the state. She loves enlightening folks to the fascinating world of the freshwater mussel in addition to chasing them around the waters of Wisconsin. So, welcome to the VMO show, Lisie.

Lisie: Good morning.

Stacy: Oh, it’s so good to see you again. I love hearing you talk about mussels. And let me tell you, the listeners, if you’re listening right now, if you’re not into science, if you’re not into fish or what’s lurking behind our waters, just stay tuned because Lisie makes it so interesting to understand why these native mussels are so important to our water. So, why don’t we just start with a description like what is a mussel? Is it different from a clam? And what kinds of mussels can be found in Wisconsin’s water?

Lisie: So, our native mussels are commonly called clams, and so you’ll hear me use the terms interchangeably, and that’s not uncommon. It’s just, you know, it’s got two shells rather than a snail, which only has one shell. And is not the same as our invasive zebra mussels, which are the bad mussels. Zebra mussels are an invasive species that gets super abundant and attaches to everything it can attach to. And our native mussels don’t attach to anything. So they’re free living and we do have some native clams, but the native clams only get to be about the size of a dime. They don’t get as big as our native mussels, which can get… the large guys can get as big as a dinner plate, the washboards, and then but then there’s little guys that are only like an inch long, the lily puts. So they’re highly variable. We have 50 species in the state. They range in size from, as I said, big to small size, shapes, colors. Some have bumps. Some have ridges. Some are smooth. So, they’re highly variable. And you’ll see the shells, the dead shells in the um, laying on the lakes, rivers, and streams bottoms. But you’ll also find the live guys. And sometimes in the sand bars, you’ll see the trails where they’ve been moving around in the sand just trying to get to a different spot.

Stacy: They don’t have legs. So, how do they move?

Lisie:They have a foot just like a snail. So, think of it like a snail, but it has two shells instead of one, and they just crawl on that foot.

Stacy: That’s amazing. And they can’t see where they’re going, but they do. They have an instinct to reach water. Like, how does that work?

Lisie: Yeah. No, unfortunately, when [dams] have a draw down or these some of these drought conditions, they don’t know where the deeper water is. Unfortunately, these our native mussels, they don’t have a brain. They don’t have eyes. So, they kind of just go in circles sometimes or they go, you know, squiggly paths to try and find deeper water. So, they don’t really know.

Stacy: Well, that’s amazing. Well, we’ll get into their ideal habitat in a minute, but I’d like to learn a little bit more about the difference between the native mussels and the invasive ones particularly how they benefit our our ecosystem and how they benefit water. So, so why don’t you start by talking about what mussels do, how they eat, and how they help clean water.

Lisie: Yeah. So, all of the native mussels siphon water from the surrounding water and then they concentrate that, they take out the nutrients that they want and then they spit out the rest. And that the rest that they spit out is called a “pseudo feces,” which sounds they should just be called feces, but anyway. But that then drops to the bottom and the other bugs and crayfish and other things that live on the bottoms of the rivers, that’s a food source for them that wouldn’t be made available to them otherwise because it’s up in the water column and they can’t get at it. So, they concentrate that. Zebra mussels can do the same. The problem with zebra mussels is they get super abundant and they take everything and then that limits the nutrients available for larval fish for the other bugs and things that live in the river. So they take they don’t they’re not in balance with our natural systems whereas our native mussels are in balance with our natural systems. So they don’t take too much from the water column. The other thing is they’re really good at concentrating contaminants. And that’s why I tell people not to eat them because they are really good at concentrating contaminants.

Stacy: I was going to ask like if this is a a food source for for folks or it sounds like let’s let’s not for humans.

Lisie: Muskrats, raccoons, otter, those guys eat them. Cranes, herons, they eat them and other fish eat them and that’s I think that’s fine. But I wouldn’t for personal consumption. Now, the Native Americans ate them literally by the ton. And if you go to the old fish camps, you’ll find huge piles of shells. And I’m sure that, you know, they just waded out and gathered a whole lot of mussels. And what they did with them was they smoked them and they made something like a jerky. And so, I’m sure in the middle of the winter, you could chew on a jerky, a clam for however long. And then they also ground them up and put them in their stews and things like that. But none of our native tribes eat them anymore because we don’t monitor the contaminants in them like we do in the fish. Yeah.

Stacy: Wow. Can you think of any water bodies in Wisconsin that have been negatively impacted by invasive mussels?

Lisie: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Stacy: Tell me a story about one that’s particularly concerning.

Lisie: Well, I think Lake Winnebago is a good example. It’s huge and they’re the zebra mussels are get so abundant and they only live for a couple years and then they die and then they leave these sharp little shells because they’re only about an inch long and literally we have people at the that have piers in Winnebago who are wanting to dredge out around their piers because they have so many dead shells and they they end up just, like, shoveling the shells from their piers. And we had one guy that called us and he said, “I filled up the entire back end of a pickup truck just around my pier” because they couldn’t launch their boats because of the shells and stuff. And then the sharp shells are also, if you’re walking barefoot, they can cut your feet and stuff. So that’s really… and Lake Winnebago is a big lake. The other thing is the sturgeon, we find a lot of the zebra mussels in their bellies and it it cuts up their bellies and stuff. It’s not good.

Stacy: Well, that’s bad. And then Quagga mussels I think are another kind of mussel that gets confused in the whole mussel world. What’s the deal with Quagga mussels?

Lisie: So the polymorpho… they’re both both zebra mussels and Quagga mussels are cousins and they basically do the same thing. The Quagga mussels just have a higher environmental tolerance. So they can, they can go deeper, they can tolerate colder, and they can tolerate less calcium in the water. But calcium is not a problem in our hard water, we have in Wisconsin, the bane of many people’s existence is our hard water. And yet it’s what makes really good shells in Wisconsin. And so that’s usually not a problem.

Stacy: Thanks for listening to the VMO show. I’m your guest host Stacy Harbaugh and I’m speaking with Lisie Kitchel, Wisconsin’s expert on the fascinating lives of native mussels. So Lisie, we talked a little bit in the last segment about what native mussels are and how they’re different from some of the invasive species that we see. But since native mussels do benefit our environment and our clean water, what are the ideal conditions for native mussels to thrive in Wisconsin?

Lisie: Well, since we have 50 species, there’s a lot of variability in what habitat some are found, but almost all of them like sandy, gravely, and stable sand. So, we have a bunch of rivers like the Wisconsin, the [Chippewa], which in the middle of the river, it’s a big, moving sand dune. But in other rivers, it’s stable sand. And so where you find the mussels in those sandy rivers that aren’t stable there along the banks, but in the other rivers, you’ll find them throughout the rivers in the sand, gravel, and cobble, which is that bigger rock. Some of them prefer even bigger rock. And then we have a couple species that are habitat specialists in that they they’re found under the rocks or in what I call hidey-holes where there’s a jumble of rocks, be it rip wrap or something else. And they… what it is is they’re wimpy mussels in terms of the flow. So they they want that flow refugeia. So they’re adjacent to the fast river, but they’re in that little nook that they then can hang in there. And so that’s the spectacle case in the salamander mussel. But the vast majority of them are out in the in the actual sand and gravel and you know cobble rock boulder kind of stuff that’s out there.

Stacy: So it sounds like they like clean water. They like to have a steady food source, and that’s good. So tell me a little bit more about how we support these mussels. I mean they’ve got to live. They’ve got to eat. They’ve got to reproduce so that they can keep cleaning the water. Like, how do they thrive? How do they… how do they reproduce and how do they have a a healthy population?

Lisie: Yeah, the well the big thing for a lot of them is they prefer flowing water systems. Although there’s about 12 species that you can find in lakes and they like the flowing water because it brings them their food, it brings them their oxygen, takes away their waste. The ones in lakes seem to do okay without that. But …they’re really good, well… each bustle can siphon as much as 10 to 15 up to 40 gallons of water per day. So they are our water purification systems. And we’ve had we’ve had lake associations where they did a draw down and it killed off all the mussels and then afterwards they’re like “our water quality isn’t what it used to be.” And it’s because they lost that entire filtering mechanism, which is really unfortunate. And that’s why nowadays with draw downs and things, we’re saying pick up the mussels that are stranded, throw them into deeper water. Um, and then their life cycle is really amazingly complex. So, our native mussels, um, not the zebra mussels, require a fish host, and that fish host is the only way they’re able to complete their life cycle. So, the the males release sperm that goes into the females. It fertilizes the eggs along her gills, which are called marsupial gills… that develops into a little tiny thing called a glochidia. And that glochidia is like this little Pac-Man whose sole purpose in life is to get onto the gills of a fish because they actually need the fish blood to complete their development. So when they’re released from the female, it’s just not fully developed internal organs and they have to actually get in the presence of the fish blood to develop all the rest of their internal organs. So, it’s amazingly complex. Now, the kicker here is not all mussel species will use all fish species. Some mussel species will use just one species of fish. Some will use a a group of fish like they’ll use the catfish or they’ll use the minnows or they’ll use the bass. But some of them will only use one species of fish. And why, we don’t know or understand that, but we do know that’s how it is. And then they have lots of really cool mechanisms to get the fish. Since it’s so critical that they get onto the gills of the fish, depending on the type of fish host they have, they have developed different mechanisms to try and attract that fish. So, one of them is that the the females that if they have a predatory fish, they’ve developed a what’s called a fish lure, which is the soft tissues of their body that’s developed to look like a fish. It really is amazing how it looks like a fish and they flap it like a fish. There’s one that looks like a crayfish. And then the ones that have whose hosts are things like minnows and darters who would not be interested in eating another fish. They put their all those glochidia into an egg mass called the conglutinate. And that conglutinate looks like a benthic, a bug that lives on the bottom of the river or a worm or little balls that look like food because of course the best way to attract fish is food. And different ones do different things. We have one mussel that actually grabs a hold of the head of the fish. Its host fish is a small darter, which are small guys that live on the bottom of the rivers and poke around. And there’s one that actually grabs a hold of the head and just hangs on. And you can see the gills of the fish flaring as she’s releasing all her glochidia. When she gets done, she drops off and the poor fish goes, “What just happened?” and swims away. So they have amazing mechanisms. We have one, our rarest one, which we thought would do something fancy-dancy. Not at all. It just kind of puts up this thing called an eruption and then it kind of goes “blurgh” and it just pukes up a big gray gob at the bottom of the river. But his hosts are catfish. And so what do catfish like? They like gray gobs on the bottom of the river. So they don’t need to do anything fancy-dancy because they just need to attract the host.

Stacy: That’s just incredible how these species have so co-evolved together and so specifically, incredible. But then that also makes me worried because since they’re so interdependent, you know, the the clean water comes from the mussels, the mussels need the fish to reproduce. If something happens to the fish, then it impacts the mussels, impacts the the water quality. And so, you know, we always have to be thinking about things in terms of a full ecosystem because everything is dependent on each other. Now, there was an incident that happened a couple years ago where there was a terrible drought and the lower Wisconsin River, the river levels dropped a lot and as people who live in the area had visited the river, they started noticing that there were these stranded mussels on the on the sides of the the river. And so it’s an incredible story of how a bunch of volunteers got together, particularly those who were connected with the Friends of the Lower Wisconsin River or FLOW, and amongst themselves they just said, “Hey, we’ve got to go. We’ve got to go help. We’ve got to we’ve got to deal do something with these mussels.” So, I think with advice from, you know, experts like you, folks went to the river and started relocating these mussels that were getting stuck behind rocks and, you know, parts of the habitat that weren’t a challenge to them before. Do you think that that kind of effort makes a difference?

Lisie: Oh, it makes a huge effort. I mean, they probably saved thousands of mussels in lower Wisconsin. They got out and they just throw in – what I say is throw them to deeper water where you know it’s deep enough that’s not going to get dewatered. Because often there’s channels where there’s little deeper water areas and yeah no I mean there were thousands of mussels stranded because there are a lot of mussels in there and these mussel beds can have hundreds and thousands of mussels in them and it was huge. There’s still unfortunately some boneyards there where we have lots of dead mussels and in the lower Chip. It also was.. the Chippewa River was like that too because it got low but you don’t have as many people living along that lower Chip. And so when we went back to sample that it was like boneyards. It was really sad how many mussels had been stranded and there’s nothing they can do if there’s no water.

Stacy: Yeah. So that whole ecosystem from droughts to the hydroelectric dams that control how much water comes through, you know, all of that stuff adds up to to a bigger picture of how these mussels thrive or don’t.

Lisie: Exactly. Yeah. And speaking of dams, one of the most common species when we go back to the Native American miden piles at the fish camps or we go back to the pearl button era was called the ebony shell and it was like 90% of the fish camps. It was 70% of the pearl button era and it’s called… its host has a single… they had a single host called the skip jack herring. Skip jack herring living in the Gulf of Mexico. They would swim up to the upper Mississippi to spawn in the tributaries. And when the dams were built in the 30s, the skip jack herring, which are little guys in their wimpy little fish, so they don’t do dams. But they were blocked from getting to the upper Mississippi River. So, we lost that species. And every once in a while we’ll have one about every five years we’ll have one ancient, old, decrepit ebony shell that will show up but we don’t have skip jack herring there. Yet, if you go to St. Louis which is is where the lowest dam is on the upper Mississippi and up to the first dam on the Ohio River. It’s the most abundant shell still. So it just shows you you lose that host, you lose that whole system, which is really sad. But these guys can be very long lived. 20, 30, 40, 60. We got them over 200 years on the St. Croix a couple years ago.

Stacy: A 200-year old clam.

Lisie: Yeah, mussel. Yeah.

Stacy: Amazing, amazing. Thanks for tuning in to the VMO show. I’m Stacy Harbaugh here with native mussel expert Lisie Kitchel. So, Lisie, how did you get into studying mussels?

Lisie: Well, the irony of it is I grew up on a farm pond where we had clams, and they were our native mussels, which I now know that they were all floaters, but they were the bane of my existence because I would jump in to go swimming and I’d I’d smash one of the shells and it’d cut my feet and I wish I had a dollar for every hundred of those I threw out of the water in disgust. But anyway, and who knew years later I’d be stolling the virtues of the freshwater mussel. But I did. And so I after I finished school and I was looking for… working, and a job came open on the Mississippi River and they wanted a diver and I’m a scuba diver. So I, you know, knew nothing about clams or mussels or anything. The first day out I worked with – at that point in time, we still had commercial clamming industry – and the commercial clammer showed me 40 different species and I was like, “Oh my god, how could I possibly have not even known this whole world existed?” Um, and so that was… and it truly was an enlightenment. I was like, “Oh my god.” And I kept asking all these questions about … and then the clammers were telling me, “Oh, and they have to grab onto a fish to be able to, you know, complete their life cycle.” And I didn’t believe them for a minute ‘cuz I was the new kid on the block and of course they’re going to pull my leg. And then I went back and started researching them and sure enough they had… they did require a fish to complete their life cycle and I was just dumbfounded at that. And then I got very interested in that. Then an opportunity came up to do life history work with endangered freshwater mussels and I’m like yep that’s what I’m going to do. So that’s I went back and got my masters then in working with mussels. And then came back to Wisconsin. It I wasn’t in Wisconsin at that time, and came back to Wisconsin to just continue doing mussel work and it’s been great. It’s the diversity and density of mussels in the state is just phenomenal and we’re very lucky to have what we have and a lot of it is attributable to… even though we feel like sometimes our water quality isn’t that good, it’s better than a whole lot of other places. I worked for a while in Illinois and there were only two streams where I could actually see the bottom of the river to be able to look for mussels. I actually… you just had to grub for them. And there were times in Illinois when I’d be snorkeling and I’d get hit in the head by a cornstalk and I’d look up and the the corn had been right up to the river’s edge and was falling into the riverbank. So, I think we really should appreciate our waters of Wisconsin.

Stacy: Well, it takes such a I mean it takes such a village, right? It takes, you know, good good farmers, scientists, water advocates, all working together and talking to each other to try to keep those waters clean and these very balanced ecosystems to to stay balanced and not to get to get out of whack. Well, it sounds like it’s the diversity of these mussels that really keeps you interested in this. I feel like I’ve heard you talk about how there’s a particular species of mussel that you really want to find or that you don’t get to see very often, but when you do find it, it’s really exciting. Is there any one in particular that you’ve been scouting for this year?

Lisie: We have a couple that are very rare. We have one called a snuff box which is only about two inches long. It’s the one that grabs a hold of the head of the fish. And they’re only in the Wolf River drainage and in the St. Croix drainage. So it’s… and because it’s small, it’s harder to find. And then the other one that’s very hard to find is the spectacle case and the salamander muscle, the guys that live in the refugeia because so you have to go what I call sticking your hand into these little cubby holes and and to try and find those guys. But when you do reach in there and find they’re back in there, it’s just that that’s not a place where people… typically when we do mussel surveys, you’re doing it in the stream across the, you know, in the out in the waters and not usually grubbing in those cubby holes. So, um, they… we do find them when we finally go looking for them. And the two the spectacle case was the ones that we found that were over that were 200 years old. So, and the reason you can the what happens with the mussels is they go down in the winter and so they stop growing in the winter and then that kind of makes a line on the edge of the shell and then when they come up that new growth is nice and clean and you can age them just like you do trees except when they get really old the annuli are just right next to each other. They’re not they’re really hard to tell apart. So in those shells we actually had to cut through the shell. We had some shells that were not live… dead shells and we could then… you could trace the annuli all the way to find out how old they were.

Stacy: Well, that’s amazing. I love your curiosity about these mussels. I think that’s so great and I’m looking forward to learning more from you later this month because River Alliance of Wisconsin is hosting a paddle trip on the Chippewa River near Eau Claire where we’re going to get a chance to learn how to identify mussels and learn why a healthy mussel population is key to having healthy rivers. Now, the registration deadline to sign up for that August 26th trip I think has passed by the time you’re hearing this, but you can contact us at River Alliance of Wisconsin if you’d like some more information about that event or how to join that native (mussel) rescue volunteer crew in the Lower Wisconsin Riverway, we’d be happy to tell you more about that. So, what are you looking forward to most when you join us on August 26th, Lisie?

Lisie: it’s always fun to take people out. People get really excited to to find mussel shells or clam shells and to learn what they are and to see the different varieties and just see the the colors and the patterns and the other things and and I get in the summertime I’ll get hundreds of pictures from kayakers and they’ll say, “Oh, we found these shells” and then there’s all these pictures and it’s great because I get to identify all those different mussels and stuff. People really enjoy looking for the mussels. It’s a scavenger hunt and they enjoy getting out and seeing what’s in the water and then finding other stuff, snails and other things, too.

Stacy: Oh, that sounds great. Well, I just so appreciate your your curiosity and your passion for science and for these critters. It really does make a difference in the state. So, I appreciate you so much, Lisie. Thank you for joining me today.

Lisie: Okay. thinks.

– Stacy Harbaugh, Communications Director

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