Searching for Mussels in the Huron River, Ypsilanti

The Huron River Watershed and the City of Ypsilanti searched for mussels in the Huron River below the Peninsular Dam during the summer of 2024. Before the Ypsilanti Pen Dam can be removed, the team needs to identify, count, and locate mussels so they can be relocated before demolition.
DIALOGUE:
We are in Riverside Park in Ypsilanti on the banks of the Huron River. Today, we are surveying for mussels, so it means every step is on cobble. The Huron River has multiple threatened and endangered species. We wanna make sure that we know where the mussels are living so that when the dam is taken out, we're able to relocate them to other places.
It's a very big effort, this project, so we're using all these volunteer work, these interns, to kind of collectively come together and get this project done. Right now, we're looking to try and identify what mussels are here, where they're at, where they're located along the river, so that later on, they can be relocated and potentially saved.
We're trying to restore fish passage through the Huron River.
We want to ensure that these mussels are displaced properly so that they can survive and flourish once the river is restored.
Today, is the first day we are out here. We're having great success. Everyone's finding mussels. Just about every section, two, three, four mussels are being found. We have a team of volunteers and professional biologists here with us. We stretch a line across the river that we call the transect. Now, the transect is divided into five-meter sections, and each volunteer takes one of those sections and puts on a mask and a snorkel or grabs a glass bottom bucket and spends 10 minutes looking through to find as many mussels as they can.
They pick it up and they show a mussel expert, so that was the people with the clipboards writing down information. They're the mussel experts, so they have to identify what species it is, what sex it is, how old it is, and we need to repeat that 90 times and then we'll have all of the data, yeah.
Mollusks in general are often what are considered keystone species, which are species that kind of support the whole ecosystem themselves, so mussels specifically, they help filter the water, they'll filter out bacteria and a lot of the different floating particles throughout the water, and they'll put that back into the sediment.
They're also part of an ecosystem, right? They're part of a food chain, so there's animals that rely on them as food sources, and they also filter and take up nutrients and other things from the ecosystem. They're tricky because they look exactly like rocks, and so it's really hard to find them, but occasionally, they'll see a little fleshy parts stick out of their shell, and they're pretty. A lot of them have different colorations. They have different striations. Some of them are dotted. Some of them are striped.
People have gotta know what's out there 'cause most people never see this stuff. All of this is a mystery to your normal person, unless they go out of their way to learn about it. Though they don't move, and though they appear like shells, these are animals, and because of that, we have a responsibility to make sure that they survive through the things that the humans are doing to the Huron River.