Re: NANFA-- RE: Mollusks

matt ashton (ashtonmj2003_at_yahoo.com)
Mon, 8 Mar 2004 13:04:20 -0800 (PST)

Youd be surprised how well a mussel can withstand desication as long as it is kept somewhat damp. The bags we use to collect are a really absorbant sythetic and the mesh just sucks up water...inadvertantly some juvies fall out of the bag and weve found them alive in the gunnels of the boats in some damp sand weeks and weeks later...they kinda go dormant im sure Jeremy can elaborate more on this a bit more specifically I just know from what ive seen in surveys. My guess is this is some sort of fingernail clam though but again all it needs is a fish to drop it off once its larval and we all know how fish can get into anything. Especialyl that being right next to the Miss im sure a nice rain goes over the banks and bammoo you have fish dropping glochidia off.

BG Granier <shinerscoop_at_bellsouth.net> wrote:Yep, Matt.

I can understand that, but the one's that I'm finding live in mud, plain old
freshwater mud in a drainage ditch that is maybe connected to the
Mississippi River through the water-table. This site is only about 1/2 mile
from the main channel of the mighty Mississippi but there is a BIG Levee
separating the land from the River.

Evidently, these mollusks can take heat, dessication, and have an extremely
strong survival capability since there habitat sometimes is damp mud only!
To my experience, most mussels/clams lead a strictly aquatic life and
couldn't survive the habitat where I've found these samples, at least, not
to my limited knowledge.

Keep the ideas flowing, nanfa's!

BG
----- Original Message -----
From: "matt ashton"
To:
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: NANFA-- RE: Mollusks

> Not all mussels live in flowing water, I.E. the Pond Mussel and can
sometimes prefer the sand muck to a rockier substrate...many are/were found
in lakes. The Great Lakes at one time had a nice fauna of mussels. There
are several species with the name washboard in them..they are rigded
laterally, like a washboard. There is published data about the amount of
volume zebra and quagga mussels filter especially up here in the great
lakes...quagga is a much bigger problem than the zebra now here. Asian clams
though dont seem to be too much of a competition problem because they do
like sandy substrates as opposed to most native mussels like a rocky gravely
substrate.

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