August 28, 2018 — If you’ve got 5,600 freshwater mussels, you could serve about 280 steaming plates of moules marinières. Or, you could deposit the bivalves in the Anacostia River.
The Anacostia Watershed Society has opted for the latter as part of a larger effort to clean the river and renew the mussel population. Last week, staffers and volunteers with the nonprofit placed the creatures in 28 floating baskets at seven sites along the Anacostia River—six in D.C., and one in Maryland—with varying microhabitat conditions.
Jorge Bogantes Montero, the organization’s natural resources specialist, has already checked on one of the baskets, all of which have swimming pool noodles to keep them afloat and covered tops to protect the mussels from predators.
“They look great,” he says of the mussels in the baskets by the Anacostia Watershed Society’s floating office on Water Street SE.
How does he know? He peeked into the baskets and saw mussels with two little holes, which he calls an innie and an outie (one of which is filtering water and the other is secreting waste). “I could see pairs of holes all over the bottom, so I know they are working,” says Montero. “If you see slits open, that’d be a bad sign.” The next checkup will happen in late September, about a month after their deployment.
Much like oysters, mussels can filter large quantities of water (between 10-20 gallons daily) and they eat bacteria like E. coli. But that’s just one of their benefits to the ecosystem, says Montero. “They are providing a lot of ecosystem services even beyond filtration,” he says, like depositing sediment at the bottom of the river. Other critters also use their shells as places for shelter or nesting.